


Making of a Tsar

by inK_AddicTion



Series: Age of Rust [2]
Category: Guardians of Childhood & Related Fandoms, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Abusive people in authority, Apollo is from my fics remembrance and gatekeeper, Child Abandonment, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Classism, Derogatory Language, F/M, Graphic Child Abuse, M/M, Physical Abuse, Rape Mentions, Self-Harm, Verbal Abuse, but reading them isnt necessary unless you want extra info on him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-05-27 18:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6295579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before there was the Man in the Moon, there was the Golden Age. And during the Golden Age, the Constellations were ruled by a man named Apollo, very different to his son, who became the last Lunanoff. But even Apollo Lunanoff, the man who brought the Constellations through a war, was a child once. This is his story - told through his beloved protector Nightlight's eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fire

**Author's Note:**

> So this is about my interpretation of Tsar Lunanoff IX. Bear in mind, this contains quite a few headcanons of mine that may be a little confusing. If you'd like to know more or want some clarification, ask me.

It has been the special job of Nightlight to watch over all the young Lunanoffs, to guard them and protect them, and keep their dreams sweet in times of strife, since the moment the first true Lunanoff opened their eyes to the world. He has seen many different young Lunanoffs in his time, naughty ones and nice ones, Tall Ones and the Small Ones they started off as, and though his opinion is rarely asked and his counsel hardly sought, knows very well how to keep safe and nurture a precious Small One, especially one gifted with the Blessing and Curse of Lunanoff magic.

By virtue of Lunanoff magic, miracles beyond knowledge have been created, by its curse, they have been unmade in the same day.

Nightlight will always remember the story of the last true ruling Tsar of the Constellations, a man who comes into power at the beginning of one of the most ferocious battles against the Living Darkness the stars in their varied lore will ever see, a leader wise, capable and strong, though he possesses many flaws and holds in his heart twisted cravings and black-warped addictions, as all Lunanoffs before him.

However, this great man, Lunar Apollo Lunanoff IX, son of Tsar Lunar Asterion Lunanoff VIII and Tsarina Sagittarius Nevaeh Lunanoff, is much like any other Small One at age two.

Apollo is rather behind on his knowledge of human tongues, but he totters from place to place, grabbing onto whatever is close for support with his little lips pouting as he concentrates. He laughs with the gentlest and most infectious giggle, he plays with his blocks and his toys with the sensible reasoning of any two-year old, and is no less rambunctious and demanding for his quietness.

He has bright white eyes and bright white skin and bright white hair, like all Lunanoffs who are born with the magic bleaching their bodies. Sometimes, if the sun catches him right and the young one happens to be running about without his clothes (a frequent occurrence usually preceding bathtime), Nightlight can see the starmaps of his veins and organs through his chubby childlike body. As he grows, Nightlight assures a worried Nevaeh, his body will begin to look a little more solid, and less shimmering, like a small star-boy pulled from the heavens too early.

Apollo makes himself, and his incessant curiosity, well known to the palace stars, though, who bear his silent, yet shrill demands with the peaceful, unaffected forbearance of a well-trained slave. They have been here since Tsar Asterion’s mother was a baby at least, and are quite adept on the perfect mixture of friendly indulgence and courteous deafness.

In matters of the babies, they defer always to Nightlight, who considers it a good sign that Apollo takes so well to star-speech, Nightlight’s most natural language and that of the dreamy pilots in their wishing stars; he hopes that this means Apollo will grow with friends from the races of humans and stars. All born-Lunanoffs have the ability, Nightlight explains to Apollo’s mother, who watches her silent son with concern, and have tendencies to favour development of one language over another; it is simply another facet of their magic.

Of course, with power so great and destructive as the Lunanoffs have, it is no wonder that there are occasionally… _accidents._ The Towers of the Moon are sturdy buildings, but many of the furnishings and decorations are frequently replaced due to a childish temper tantrum activating incredible displays of out of control magic.

However, Apollo Lunanoff, Nightlight does have to admit, has caused somewhat of a special case.

It is a rare sunny afternoon and the emerald sky above the Celestial City, the capital city-planet of the Constellations and seat of the royal family, is bright and clear, excellent visibility for skimmers that whir overhead like darting flies. Within the hazy octagon panels of the great tubes of gardens around the milk white Towers of the Moon, the fierce sun is somewhat tempered by the thickness of the shielding, and filtered through the leaves of interlocking crawling vines, their colourful throats of flowers open to sing. Birds flit from branch to branch, and fairies chatter and giggle somewhere under a mushroom.

It is a perfect day, and made even more so by the fact that the Tsarina has convinced her Tsar to join herself and their toddler son in relaxing in the heat. Nightlight perches proudly nearby, keeping a sharp eye on the young tsarevich, who is poking at what appears to be an ant-hive, or maybe a fairy-nest.

They are in one of the western woods sections; a great stand of dark purple trees imported from a faraway star system where the Singing Trees, so named for the sweet chorus their scintillating turquoise and emerald leaves make when they rub together, are carefully cultivated. Their interlocking branches provide deep wells of indigo shade, colouring the grass in deep blues and calming colours that make the Lunanoffs stand out like lost fae, taking shelter from the sun.

Tsarina Nevaeh has her knees tucked up underneath her, smiling prettily at her rather sour looking husband, though without any success. Asterion is sat beside her, but without her, his attention is consumed by an important-looking sheaf of holo-docs hovering around him, a stylus perched expertly in his busy fingers. There is the call of voices on the breeze and the shimmering giggle of a star-servant; the royal family are not alone in enjoying the summer heat.

No one watches the toddler Apollo save Nightlight.

Apollo is investigating a fallen leaf, the edges of which are curling up crisply, patting it and turning it this way and that between his small hands, eyes tracking the veins. He gurgles for attention, but neither mother nor father notice.

Nightlight hops off the carven balustrade he is perched on, and crouches beside the prince, making the proper displays of enthusiasm and curiosity. Heartened by Nightlight’s support, Apollo waves his chubby fists excitedly and rams the leaf back against the indigo bark of the cracked tree, spiderwebs of pinkish white flaring for a moment from his touch. The crushed leaf makes a pleasing crunch.

A startled fairy shoots out of a bolthole, brilliant buzzing wings as cutting as thorn pricks as she dives at the toddler, the high screams of her angry voice tinny and peeping to the bigger Nightlight and Apollo. Though her body is tiny, it is gilded with dagger-points, and lines of red are raised, glaring, on Apollo’s milky skin.

He wails and kicks, and Nightlight feels it before he sees it, a threatening build of nearly-thunderstorms. A spark leaps from Apollo’s fingers, then another. The air begins to charge, a taste of something fiery and intense splashing over Nightlight’s tongue, making the hair on the back of his neck prickle in fearful anticipation. A low echo comes from some deep core inside of Nightlight as the young Apollo’s skin begins to glow faintly, his silver-white eyes brightening and paling as all the magic within him rises to the churning surface.

The red raised wounds on his cheeks begin to hiss with magic, and Nightlight glances hopefully at Asterion and Nevaeh; if the parents notice, perhaps they can calm their child before he sends a storm crashing down upon their heads.

Nightlight lifts the boy onto his lap and bounces him onto the bony carapace of his armoured knees, making soft, chuckling noises of soothing, and smiling his cheeriest and brightest smile. But Apollo squirms unhappily in his constrictive hold, his little face scrunching up with displeasure. Sparks trail from his beating fists like the brilliant tails of comets, and static stands Apollo’s fine pale hair on end.

Asterion, absorbed in his documents and ignorant of his son at the best of times, does not notice, despite Nightlight’s frantic looks. Another flash leaps from Apollo’s young fingers, dissipates crackling into the air. But Nevaeh begins to frown, some mother’s intuition, perhaps, though the Tsarina has all the magical sensitivity of a wood block.

Another lightning zap of magic. It is collecting in the air, working into a great cloud of hovering magic, ready to ignite. Apollo’s hurt, his anger and frustration are powering the quick bursts, releases that feel like sharpening a cruel knife Apollo instinctively reacts with when his tumultuous emotions get out of control.

Nightlight hurriedly puts Apollo down, thinking perhaps to tug Asterion’s arm, draw a little power from Apollo, but then, suddenly, it happens.

The final spark leaps from Apollo’s mouth as he howls. It is a little thing on its own, insignificant, but the air is alight with magical discharge, and it splits like a clap of thunder. Brilliant white fire blossoms into being where there was none.

It swirls out of the toddler’s mouth like white roses, pale and perfect, pallid petals that drift and eddy in the static silence. Everything seems to slow, and Nightlight watches with wondering eyes that hope Apollo is gifted with powers not so destructive as they appear. The fiery rose drifts, and sways, spinning like a effervescent candle. One fire-rose brushes a dark purple trunk, and heat and light explodes outwards.

The Singing Trees light up instantly. Sap pops with loud cracks, gashes splitting like wounds in the darkish bark, rendered black by the clambering plumes of smoke that twist and claw up to the sky. Fire spreads quickly, roars itself into a ravenous inferno that greedily begins to consume the palatial gardens.

Nightlight can hear screaming, rough angry shouts, and Apollo’s terrified crying as heat licks at his young skin and scorches his hair dark with soot. Nevaeh is calling desperately for her son, and Nightlight can see flickering swathes in the dense walls of flame where Asterion is lashing out with his powers, sucking the magic from the air like a dehydrated sponge.

Raw cries from other areas of the garden echo; the stand where the Lunanoffs have sat is not deserted, and now these other garden-goers are caught in the incredible heat and ferocity of the tsarevich’s fire, their dying screams ghoulish and high in the wavering world of smoke and destruction.

The toddler Apollo is crouched at the hollow base of the tree he has crowned in wraithlike flames, his eyes wide and terrified and pale in his soot-stained face. Dried tear tracks, evaporated by the shimmering heat, carve strange intricate lines down his chubby cheeks. He reaches for Nightlight, fear making his inarticulate cries louder, his silent ones stronger.

Nightlight hesitates for only a moment, because while there is a great barrier of flames blocking him from his young charge, Nightlight is sworn to protect. Gritting his teeth, he charges through the fire, feeling his armour heat up instantly with him still inside, like a boiling pan. White fire grabs and pulls at Nightlight’s hair, blistering his skin and face black, but he does not care, not when he can reach and scoop Apollo into his arms.

The toddler safe, though crying and squirming from the hot surface of Nightlight’s armour scalding his skin, Nightlight turns desperately, evaluating the furious flickering flames for a weakness, a space where he might dash through relatively unharmed. He hears Nevaeh cry again, and suddenly, the magical white fires begin to waver and suck backwards, as if a great air is pushing them down.

The recalcitrant flames are relentlessly pulled back until they are mere, weak shadows of before, pallid insubstantial things that flicker timidly around Nightlight’s ankles. Tsar Asterion is godlike before them, his soul-sucking brand of magic leashing the wild, out-of-control fires to his will, shackling them under his skin. Behind him, the Tsarina cowers, her eyes wild with fear though incredibly relieved when Nightlight holding Apollo safely appears in the mist of smoke.

The Tsar’s pales as he corrals the rampant magic, a backwards Lunanoff that works off absorbing energy rather than releasing it. Apollo squirms back against Nightlight’s breastplate, soft tears of fear echoing discordantly in the silent realms where the stars speak as his towering father brings his hands together, his flashing eyes filled with a terrible rage.

Even Nightlight cannot quite control his nervousness when approaching the Tsar through the last of the weak flames quailing under his magnificent anger. The beautiful gardens have been reduced to a wasteland, far-distant twisted corpses burnt into non-recognition, screams of the wounded and grieved, the octagonal panels scorched and blackened with soot, the wonders and plants destroyed by Apollo’s careless emotions.

The gardens are ruined, but the conflagration has lasted minutes at most. It is an impressive feat for any magic-user, but for a young toddler, incomprehensible.

“Apollo! Apollo…” Nevaeh gasps, running out from behind her husband’s protection. Apollo reaches for her, his small hands grasping and his sobs increasing. He is frightened, frightened but exhausted, Nightlight can see the colour sinking into his cheeks, the way his eyes lid.

“Don’t.” Tsar Asterion’s voice cuts, cold, between the mother and the son, and she pauses, turning her head back to look pleadingly at her husband. Nevaeh has known for too long only obedience to Tsar Asterion, and does not protest when he gestures her sharply behind him, just like a dog called to heel.

Nightlight’s spine stiffens as Tsar Asterion evaluates Nightlight’s charge with a chilly, furious eye. “He cannot stay,” he announces, then begins to walk away.

Nightlight blinks, and clutches Apollo a little closer. The Small One means no harm, he thinks, Asterion knows this. Nightlight has held Asterion when he was Small too, protected him from the tempestuous nature of Lunanoff magic – Asterion knows to forgive his son accidents.

But Tsar Asterion will not.

“ _Asterion!”_ Nevaeh sounds horrified. “Please - you do not mean-? Where would he go?” She catches his forearm, and he stiffly jerks his head to glare at her until she releases him, backing off. “Asterion,” she says quietly. “Asterion, he’s our son, it was just a little mistake - he’s our _son.”_

“I have no time for a weak child that cannot control himself,” Tsar Asterion states, “Once he learns control, he will return. As for where he will go, I trust you will make the arrangements yourself. Somewhere far from here, isolated enough that he won’t cause trouble.”

Nevaeh’s eyes shine with tears and she grabs her hands to her mouth, evidently trying to stifle her distress before Tsar Asterion notices; it is too late, his nose wrinkles faintly with disgust at her emotional display. She swallows. “You’re sending us away?”

“You?” Asterion sounds puzzled. “No, I have use for you - you’ll remain here. Send the child on by himself. He’ll survive.”

Defeated, Nevaeh bows her head, and Nightlight can read relief in her stance that _she_ won’t be sent out, in exile from her husband, her one reason for living. The Tsarina has ever been a weak woman, knows it herself, admits it, if she dares. 

Tsar Asterion strides off through the wastelands of burnt grass and once-beauties, ignoring the charred lumps of corpses caught in the fire, the tears and panic of those running around, struggling to understand what has just happened. Such a small accident, a small child having a temper tantrum - but so very devastating. 

The Tsarina turns to her son and Nightlight, with a soft, pained smile, tears rolling down her cheeks. “You heard Daddy, baby,” she says to her son in Nightlight’s arms. “We had best go pack your bags.”

The young Apollo offers her a watery, faintly confused grin, and opens the fist of his hand to show a perfect, intact green-blue leaf.

He will not see his mother again for thirteen years, and while they do not know it then, that meeting will be their last.


	2. cage

It has been six years since the fateful accident at the Towers of the Moon. Tsarevich Apollo has been sent away to grow up in the isolated star system 6891 Lyncis, on the small, gravid planet called Lyncis II. Now eight years old, Apollo lives far away from his mother, father, and beloved guardian Nightlight.

Nightlight visits whenever he can, but the visits are often few and far between, sometimes with months or even years passing before Nightlight can beg Tsar Asterion into allowing him to leave. Tradition dictates that Nightlight’s first priority is to protect the Lunanoff Small Ones, only after that is he to serve the Tall members of the family. However, in light of the unrest boiling among the Constellations and the encroaching threat from the Living Darkness, the Tsar has ordered that Nightlight should remain at his side instead, since Apollo has the protected complex on Lyncis II to keep him safe.

But on this day, Nightlight has permission to visit, and he intends to take full advantage of it. 

He has not stopped since the moment the Tsar Asterion granted him leave, enduring first the slow crawls of transport liners, then the quicker courier ships, and finally hitching a ride off of a friendly star pilot to reach the Lyncis II space-station, above the dusty, depressing-looking planet. From above, it is dull shades of orange and tan, obscured by the whipping turbulence of the electromagnetic storms common on Lyncis II.

A shuttle-ride later and he is on the wind-blasted, toxic surface, where everyone is wearing face masks and protective suits. No one talks to Nightlight, who feels even his indomitable spirits take a hit from the sparse and cold environment. It is several hours Lyncis-time of working through the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the barren surface before Nightlight reaches the isolated centre wherein Apollo dwells.

The people of Lyncis II all live below the surface, burrowing away from the furious intensity of the storms. Shut-in, entombed in rock, and far from the nearest populated star system save 6897 Peveret, they are sheltered and secretive, distrusting of newcomers. True to form, the guides that usher him indoors are silent and their faces are downcast. No one asks why he is here, no one asks why it has been so long since he last came. No one asks why he always goes to the same isolated complex where no other Lyncian is allowed to go. No one asks, no one cares about the affairs of a strange, glowing foreigner, dressed in his outlandish armour with the prominent symbols of the Lunanoffs inscribed in the medallion he wears around his neck.

Nightlight, descending into that claustrophobic city of faux-rock walls and clean space-station white panels, stifles the elements of panic that stir within him. The whispers of those watching him from the safety of their homes, dark eyes glinting behind half-closed doors, hardly helps. Nightlight inhales and thinks of the wide, open beauty of the night sky, splashed with nebulae and studded with stars, a sight that Apollo will never have seen. Such a dreary, deprived life, Nightlight thinks privately.

He vows that one day, he will bring Apollo to a meteor shower, and watch him play among the stars that are his brothers in spirit if not quite in flesh.

Nightlight takes a railcar away from the sparsely populated city, if it can be called that. The car is dark and rattling, with a faulty lightstrip that flickers, wan and yellowish, over Nightlight’s pale skin. The vibrations of the car over the rails of the tracks thrums through his feet, and the metal rod of the seat creaks threateningly under his slight weight. Flares of too-bright light divide the low, sloping tunnels into sharp contrasts of black shadow and glaring light.

The complex that houses the Tsarevich is heavily guarded and so deeply underground that the air feels hot, almost stifling, from the planet’s core. Sweat beads along Nightlight’s forehead and his armour begins to feel uncomfortably warm. The glisten of evaporated moisture is not on the walls, though, they are rough, sandy, and dry, an unpleasant difference.

Put together, it makes an unnerving, unwelcoming atmosphere not unlike dank mausoleums where dead things are put to rot and stagnate. Nightlight does not want to think of the Tsar thinking of his son that way - and besides, Tsar Asterion has never visited the complex on Lyncis II. He is probably completely unaware of how it feels to a free-spirited creature who rebels against chains.

The railcar creaks to a slow, screeching stop, and Nightlight clambers out, manoeuvring his spiked armour out of the door to stop it from catching. Looking around, he idly brushes the dark plates of his armour free of dust. The railcar begins to lumber back to the city.

The narrowing tunnel ends abruptly in a thick, shielded door emblazoned with protective digits of trapping and containment, not unlike the sort that Nightlight would expect to see at a prison. The flat, artificial glow of the bright lights gives everything a depthless, oddly disorienting feel that makes Nightlight shake his head, want to reach out and touch the wall for balance. A light film of dust particles coat his fingers when he does so.

At the door, he presses his palm to the wall, searching for the keypad. It is half-hidden behind a twisting rock formation, a thin white tablet set in the wall with an incongruous holo-system that glows faintly when Nightlight swipes his thumb over the screen. Nightlight taps in his personal code (he has written it carefully on the wristcomm Tsar Asterion insists he carries) and waits.

There is a long delay. A ticking noise starts up behind the doors, the whirring of mechanisms unlocking and tumblers sliding into place. It takes, if Nightlight is a creature in the spirit of counting, almost one full hour to unlock the doors. There is a great shuddering groan of hinges, then the doors leisurely slide open just enough to admit Nightlight’s skinny body.

Nightlight squeezes through. Offering a bright smile to the overworked looking old woman with more wrinkles than face operating the doors, he lifts slightly into the air, relieved that the tunnel complex has become much wider. The anteroom is big, lit by irregular lanterns set into the rock, with the darkish gloss of guard droids waiting for a command, their shiny metal gleaming like the carapaces of beetles. The floor is bare and scuffed with dust, the room is barren, punctuated by the occasional roughly hewn tunnel that gapes in the uneven walls like open mouths.

The woman snorts and gives him a bleary, yet baleful glare. She might have been tall once, but old age has stooped and withered her, but her eyes, while half-blind, are still caustic and cold. She has been Apollo’s appointed guard and nursemaid ever since he was taken from the Towers of the Moon, and has never expressed joy in the job.

“Eh. You again,” she grunts. She has never bothered to learn Nightlight’s name, regarding him with a faint suspicious distrust, as if she expects Nightlight to do something _foreign_ or _alien_. From occasional, stilted conversations, Nightlight knows she is an avid xenophobe who has a deeply-nursed hatred of all things inhuman or unnatural. Possibly, he thinks, not the best choice for nurturing of a Lunanoff Small One, who are born to straddle the boundaries between star and man. “He’s been overexcited for weeks. Won’t shut up down there.” Vaguely, she gestures down one of the looming passageways.

Nightlight drops to the tips of his toes, beaming his brightest smile. His armour clicks on the floor. Hopefully, he bats his eyes - can Nightlight go see Apollo now? He is really very excited to see his precious tsarevich again; it has been so long!

“Eh,” she huffs, and limps over to a opening in the wall, a hand massaging her bent spine. “GIRL!” she screeches down the tunnel. There is the helterskelter pattering of young feet, punctuated by, oddly, the chime of jangling bells.

An instant later, a young girl, around eight, dashes out of the passageway, a thick braid of black hair woven with bells and ribbons bouncing on her back, at odds with her small bare feet. She is obviously a born Lyncian, something in the set of her eyes, dark and heavily-lashed, the dun colour of her skin. She skids to a stop upon seeing Nightlight, her eyes going shiny and round with awe and fear. She does not speak, but fidgets anxiously and looks at the older woman, fiddling with the hems of her somewhat dirty greyish smock.

“Alysea,” the woman says, “Bring…” She waves her fingers dismissively, indicating Nightlight, “down to the boy.”

“Yes, Amma,” says the girl Alysea meekly. “May I have the keys, Amma?”

“Eh,” says Amma. She limps back to her station, a run-down chair with the stuffing poking out and a rickety table, and fishes around into the darkness underneath. She pulls out a thick iron ring with a single key and tosses it at Alysea’s feet, who scoops it up and tucks it into her belt.

Alysea squints at Nightlight, then evidently decides it’s too much bother to talk. Nightlight does not mind; too many words make his head hurt, and Apollo’s sure to be full of them. Well, Nightlight hopes he is, hopes that the spirit of this place hasn’t crushed Apollo.

The way hasn’t changed since Nightlight visited last. It is the same flight of dingy steps, lit by red lanterns that cast dim, uneasy shadows on the walls and flickers of light. Nightlight watches his step; the roughly hewn steps are purposely different sizes, to disorient a possible attacker. Eventually, he gives up and floats lightly after the nimble Alysea, who takes the path with the ease of familiarity. The tingle of  powerful wards brushes over his skin, and Nightlight shudders – things of _caging,_ of _restraint,_ of _crushing resistance._

The winding staircase abruptly smooths into fine, elegant black marble. Nightlight does not know how far down they are now, far enough that the heat licks like a lover, close and obsessive and on the edge of _too-much._ Sweat and trepidation skate in chills over the hidden body under the armour.

The great hall-like corridor of black marble held by sturdy pillars of lead has not changed either, the ceiling swooping away into dizzying blackness, old scorch marks scratching grooves and melted stone like solidified wax casting strange, wobbling shadows against shadows. At the far end, a cheery blaze of warm light shines, striped by the outlines of thick bars. The lead cages the effect of Apollo’s magic, and Nightlight feels the difference; walking into the Tsarevich’s luxurious prison feels like draping a thick wet blanket over his senses.

Gentle, slightly off key humming echoes around the walls; there are good acoustics in this place. No wonder Amma is annoyed – she can probably hear Apollo all the way up in the anteroom. However, the instant Alysea puts her small foot down on the marble, it stops. Ominous silence quickly fills the dark hall. There is a pause, and goosebumps visibly ripple over Alysea’s skin.

“Alyysseeeaaa,” a high bright voice calls finally, “I can feel you standing there!” There is no way Apollo can see them from his rooms, down at the far end of the great hall. Nightlight’s eyebrow raises, impressed. He must be using his magic to sense through the stone. But how is he doing it with the presence of all the lead? The force it would take to counteract it all… Apollo’s magic must have become deeply entrenched in his surroundings.

“Ah, ‘Lo, you took far less to sense me this time!” Alysea calls back, and charges on ahead towards the voice, showing not an ounce of fear.

“Alysea, is there someone with you?” Apollo asks, his voice echoing, soft and worried and faintly hopeful, disbelieving. “There is - I can feel a disturbance… In the dust in the air.”

Alysea laughs, and it is strange to hear the sound of joy from such a sullen little girl that mixed in with the bells of her bouncing hair, she seems almost pixie-like. “Feel who it is, ‘Lo!”

“Amma never comes down anymore,” the boy replies sadly, “and no one else comes to see me.”

Nightlight pauses, his feet not yet brushing the floor. Alysea is silhouetted in the light, crouching excitedly in front of a tall wall of bars, behind which there is an elaborately furnished sitting room, with doors leading off to the other rooms in Apollo’s suite, decorated in cosy terracotta and deep browns that attempt to combat, with their richness, the barrenness of the empty dark hallway pressing in on the cage.

Strikingly, there are thick, comfortable, but jarringly child-sized cuffs for wrists and ankles bolted to the wall. Above those, a padded collar of lead dangles. There are even straps to tie across Apollo’s hips and forehead for when he is bucking and twisting, fighting against the restraints in the grip of the lunacy the shift of the planets and moons bestow on him. A calendar is hung outside the cell, upon which dates are marked with sharp crosses.

Those are the days that Apollo will suffer under the crushing weight of the Lunanoff curse.

“Not Amma, ‘Lo,” says Alysea patiently. “Someone else!” She drops her voice, as if the echoing hall doesn’t throw it out loudly. “I don’t like him, ‘Lo.”

“But who-?” Apollo says, and Nightlight tilts his head to see his tsarevich, barely able to hold back a terrible sadness at the sight of the eight year old boy clutching the bars, straining forwards towards Alysea as if he wishes to bleed through them, his brilliant white hair long and uncut, almost to his waist, and skin shining with a faint radiance of Lunanoff youth. He wears handsome clothes of periwinkle blue, looks clean and healthy and well-fed, a stark contrast to Alysea. Where she is skinny and dirty and wears her ragged shift, yet stands free, he is the groomed and beautiful songbird kept in its pretty cage to preserve its glossy feathers.

Nightlight takes pity on him, and drops to the floor, then steps into sight. In an instant, Apollo’s eyes widen and his entire body begins to glow vigorously with joy. _“NIGHTLIGHT!_ You came! I thought-” He turns a disbelieving look on Alysea, tears beginning to brim in his eyes. “You were right, Aly, I won’t doubt you again!”

Alysea snorts dryly. “You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t think your opinion was the only right one, 'Lo,” she mutters, but Apollo ignores her.

Beaming, Nightlight rocks forward onto his toes. He walks towards the cage, and Apollo simply stares at him, his mouth hanging open as if he has forgotten that Nightlight looks back on Apollo’s astonishment. Amused, Nightlight gives him a little wave, and Apollo jerks, at once panicked and shy, stepping back from the bars and lowering his head, those his pale eyes can’t stop flicking up to watch Nightlight advance.

It has been too long. It will always be too long. Nightlight is no safely trusted protector to Apollo – he is a cruel reminder of the tsarevich’s old home, of the life he should be leading, a world outside his isolated prison filled with reminders and rules he doesn’t understand. Apollo is hesitantly eager with him, wanting desperately to verify the impossible truth of a _visitor,_ someone who cares enough to descend into this dark hall that sings with Apollo’s magic, to unlock the cage of a father’s disinterest and welcome the lonely little boy with his demands for attention.

“Can you come in?” Apollo almost begs. “I won’t hurt you, it’s nowhere near the full moon, I’m not dangerous, I _promise!_ I promise I won’t do anything, see-” He retreats back, pulls on the lead chains on the wall. “Alysea can wrestle me into these faster than a blink – please, _Nightlight,_ I can’t believe you’re here, when Alysea told me Amma had said you were, I didn’t believe, where have you been? Did you bring a message from mother? How is she? Did she get the dress she was talking about in her last letter? Does she like it? Is she coming to visit like she keeps saying?”

There are cracks in his smile and the tears are beginning to show.

“Like she keeps saying but never does…? Does father want me back yet? Please say he does, I can be good, I promise, and the full moons aren’t even that bad anymore if I have the chains, and if Alysea’s there –  I can show you, I promise, I haven’t destroyed anything apart from this one chair in _months,_ and I’ve been doing all the work you dropped off even though the lessons are very hard and Alysea’s not very good at explaining what people do and I’ve taught her everything I’m doing just in case but the reading and the maths are so hard and I’d much rather be drawing, and _you’re here you’re here you’re here you’re here!”_

By the end of the rant he is bouncing on his feet, grabbing at the bars again, shyness almost forgotten in the face of his excitement, his smile looks like it’s going to split open his face, though there are tears pouring down his cheeks and he’s trembling from a mixture of terror and glee.

Nightlight nods, then pauses and some of the happiness melts off his face. Slowly, he takes out a letter and hands it to Apollo through the bars, who pounces on it eagerly, ripping it open and devouring the words. The boy’s face falls further with every line he reads, until he sits heavily on the floor.

“So, father says I should stay here and mother’s too busy to see me-!” he declares, in a faltering voice that valiantly tries to cover the heartbreak in his eyes. “I’m sure – one day, he’s going to want me back. Isn’t he? Nightlight? He’s going to want me one day, won’t he?”

Alysea crouches beside the bars in front of Apollo. She stretches her hand through, and after a moment, Apollo takes it. The children clutch onto each other, hard, and though Alysea does not say a word, Apollo seems to understand, though his small face is scrunched up and red from the effort of holding back tears, the strain of trying to keep a smile to mask it all.

Nightlight feels awful. He knows there is nothing he can do to alleviate the ache of longing and loss in Apollo’s heart, and he wishes he could stay here for longer. He checks his wristcomm and his heart sinks at the time. He doesn’t have long, but he can cherish the time with Apollo while he has it.

Putting his hand over the bars, Nightlight tilts his head hopefully at Alysea and points to the keys at her belt. She sniffs at him and rises. Apollo backs away, though his face tragically lights up again when he realises Nightlight is coming inside his prison.

“I want to show you something!” says Apollo, excitedly, though he dashes to a small desk in the corner of the sitting room and carefully presses the letter down first, smoothing it out with the utmost delicacy.

Nightlight waits impatiently for Alysea to unlock the door, which swings inwards. She lets Nightlight and herself in, then closes it and locks it again. Nightlight wonders if Alysea has ever let Apollo out of the cage, and what a cruel thing it must be to be friends with one’s jailor.

Apollo chatters excitedly about the things he has memorised since Nightlight has been gone – perfectly, he recites the histories of the Constellations, grabbing Nightlight’s hands with no respect for personal space and pulling him through the apartments. Every inch of the walls is covered with drawings, accurate star maps, pencil drawings of Alysea (thousands of those alone), hunched crones that can only be Amma, strangers that Apollo explains Alysea describes to him. All the drawings have one thing in common – they are highly, extremely detailed, though not always correctly.

“I can feel everything that happens in this complex, every time a mouse runs across the floor or water drips or Amma’s heart beating or the doors unlocking,” says Apollo, blinking when he sees Nightlight looking. “When I meditate, I can sink my magic into the roots of the whole planet,” he adds, grinning when he sees Nightlight’s shock.

He ushers Nightlight through his rooms, showing him gleefully first one thing, than another. Apollo clearly has no material wants – he has a personal gym with a swimming pool, a luxurious bedchamber with a king-size bed, a wardrobe bigger than most bedrooms, a massive bathing chamber complete with another pool, games rooms filled with toys, a fully stocked library and a study, a kitchen, a relaxing room, a music room, and an art room, which is the one he brings Nightlight to.

The first thing Nightlight sees when he walks in is a giant picture painted directly on the wall. He stops, frozen to the spot, and feeling a little like he might cry himself. It is a picture of Nightlight, holding his lance, very much central, standing beside Tsar Asterion and Tsarina Nevaeh. Nightlight recognises the picture immediately; it is a photo that Nightlight has brought to Apollo almost two years ago. But there is an addition; held in the picture version of Nightlight’s arms is a familiar white haired boy.

It is not brilliant, or even vaguely good, but Apollo is only eight, and the marks of his labour mean far more than skill. Skill can be learned, but love can only be earned – this, Nightlight knows.

“I drew you,” says Apollo, unnecessarily, “And I drew mother, and I drew father. And… I added me, too. With you. Because-” he ducks his head and flushes faintly. “I wish you didn’t have to go away again!” he bursts out, all in a rush, and Nightlight swears he can feel his heart break in his chest.

He kneels down on the floor and opens his arms. Apollo hesitates, as if he has never been hugged before, then runs forward and throws his tiny arms around Nightlight’s armoured body, not quite big enough to reach all the way around. Apollo sobs into his shoulder when Nightlight rubs his back, and Nightlight begins to sing, softly, doing his best to ease Apollo’s pain.

“ _Nightlight, bright light, sweet dreams I bestow…”_


	3. beginning

This time when Nightlight goes to see Apollo, it is not as friend or companion, but in his formal capacity as a bodyguard. Tsarevich Apollo is now ten years old, and for the first time since his long imprisonment eight years ago, has been permitted to go off-planet, for a short visit to the neighbouring star system, 6897 Peveret, more specifically to its second M-type planet, Rhea III.

They leave Alysea behind at the docks on Lyncis II; Apollo waves, pale, shaky and already frail-looking, from the ramp of the courier ship Nightlight has hired. Once the door closes, Nightlight has to catch him as Apollo's legs give way; the boy flushes (as much of a flush as he is capable, like the tint of snow over paper) and looks away in embarrassment at his own weakness.

He is not used to travelling out of the compound at all, and his magic is protesting the short walk already. Dread settles low in him. If it is this bad on-planet, once they leave, it will be even worse. Nightlight is glad for Amma's insistence on precautions; there is a cage built for star pilots in the hold, lead-lined and dark, engraved with the scents of desperation and terror. It works admirably for containing the young Tsarevich. Conversely, Apollo seems happier in chains.

“I can't hurt anyone now,” he says, tilting a too-young face up to Nightlight. “It's better like this,” he adds, in an obvious attempt to comfort Nightlight, and Nightlight feels sick to his stomach and sore in his heart at the innocent look in Apollo's eyes.

The journey is horrific. Though only a short spaceflight of a few hours intergalatic-time, for the entire duration Apollo is screaming, howling in agony and thrashing in the thick chains he is secured in for his own safety as his magic protests at being slowly, torturously ripped out of the deep roots it has made in the wasted soil of Lyncis II. Nightlight feels like a monster as he listens to the Small One's screams, feels the shape of the key to Apollo's cuffs in his pocket weigh him down, dim his light.

This is not the first time that Nightlight has had to endure hard decisions for the ultimate benefit of the Lunanoffs, but it will never get easier to hear the pain of a child and know that he is the cause.

When they touch down on the lush planet of Rhea III, Nightlight is already in the hold, carefully unlocking the chains and wiping the tears from Apollo's cheeks, the vomit from his lips, the blood dried on his face, the glaring, weeping half-moons his nails have cut into his palms, and the ugly, raised red marks from the lead cuffs. Apollo is feverish, his forehead shiny with sweat and his body bucking and turning darker than Nightlight has ever seen it as magic drains from him.

His magic is trying to reach out, to learn every nook and cranny of Rhea III the way it had with the compound, but Rhea III is much bigger than the compound, and Apollo's magic is too weak to manage it. If he loses much more magic, it is highly likely that his body will shut down, and eventually, he will die.

However, Nightlight is well-versed in this manner of tending Lunanoffs, and with his soft songs and a few hours in Nightlight's cabin, Apollo has stabilised enough in himself. They have plans to stay for a while in Rhea III, and Nightlight is glad for his forethought. It takes months before Apollo is confident enough about the world outside the tiny little compound to not collapse and hyperventilate at every new thing he encounters. When Tsar Asterion, annoyed at what, initially, had been a week long trip, turns into months and nearly a whole year, orders Nightlight to return, Nightlight switches off the communit. If he cannot hear Tsar Asterion ordering him, he is not disobeying. Technically.

The first time Apollo sees the open sky, he has a panic attack. “Where's the roof, Nini, where's the roof?” he weeps, breathless and trembling, and Nightlight presses kisses to the damp, sweat-stained white locks and sings until Apollo's mind no longer feels so fractured.

Apollo cannot bear the light of Rhea III's sun, either, his sensitive pale eyes blinded by its rays. Dark glasses do nothing, and the night sky hypnotises him into mindlessness – in those times, he is more star creature than human, every cell in his body shining all over with an unnatural light and his mouth opening and closing silently, as if he is trying to tune into the language of stars. Nightlight is not sure what saddens him more, Apollo's persistence in trying to understand or the fact that he can no longer remember how, when he was so proficient as a baby.

Nightlight hoped once that Apollo would grow to be the bridge between the star people and humanity, a bridge to span centuries of hatred, fear and discrimination, but now, he knows that Apollo would be no more capable of such a thing than he would be saving himself. Call it intuition – Apollo's powers, Apollo's mind, do not work along the lines of a peacekeeper.

They manage to move, eventually, from the cramped ship to a small villa on the outskirts of a village. Months pass while Apollo uncovers his natural inquisitiveness, and ventures out to increasingly further lengths, from local flora to fauna. People, though, remain a firm dislike of Apollo's. “They're too complicated,” the boy complains, “And they have darkness and ugly things in them and I hate them all.”

Nightlight sighs at that, but can offer no real objection. Apollo is well used to the clean, fresh, light purified atmosphere Nightlight provides, he has no experience of normal humans save Alysea, whom Apollo writes to everyday and mentions at every conversation. The taciturn Lyncian girl is somehow present in every facet of Apollo's life, and Nightlight does not question it; stars only know that Apollo needs a steadfast companion.

However, Nightlight knows that Apollo will one day rule the Constellations, and to do that, he needs to be able to tolerate his subjects. Purposefully, he asks around in the local town, and discovers that the nearby military base is staging a passout parade for its new recruits. The promise of bustle and activity, the nobleness of young soldiers in their clean and sharp uniforms and the party-like business it brought about is sure to inspire Apollo, Nightlight thinks, and arranges to be in town that night.

It is late evening and the air is crisp and clear. The stars unfurl like a map overhead, glistening strings of blue-pink pearls splashed with cosmic paints. There are two moons in the Peveret star system, Rhea Major and Rhea Minor, the greater of which is golden-harvest and looms greatly over the rocky shapes of the cliffs surrounding the town, the smaller a winking silvery eye. Starlight, cool and bright, bathes everything in a flat, monochrome glow, but magic rustles in the darknesses of whispering plant stems. Trees bend in enticing shapes and the ruts from carriages on the road are pitted with swimming pools for fairies. The buildings of the town are garbed in shimmering lights for a festival, wine and festivities floating in the air like a heavy, intoxicating fragrance.

Nightlight buys Apollo a piping hot cherry pie, and they sit on a porch step for Apollo to eat it, the red filling smearing his lips like hot bright blood, and slanted light shining in through icicles still clinging to roofs in Rhea III's chilly spring, hoarfrost spiralling like dragon's breath over windowpanes and smushed snow tramped into the ground by heavy hobnailed boots. Men shout boisterously, their voices rumbling like thunder, and women laugh, a high, tinkling counterpoint, children race barefoot through the streets shrieking with excitement, somewhere, the seductive glint of a star pilot called down from their duty for the night beckons, promising a sweet show (Nightlight makes certain to keep Apollo away from all that – he is a little young yet for the mind-robbing antics of flirtatious pilots).

They have to wait a while before the parade is due to start, but Nightlight and Apollo pass the time admirably by watching the people in front of them, laughing at them dancing in the streets and the young lovers stealing down backstreets for snatched kisses. Once or twice, Apollo leans over curiously to see what they are doing – very swiftly, he rights himself, his cheeks flushing with mortification, and then pauses to ask shy questions that Nightlight has little qualms about answering. It is not in the nature of the people to be shy about sex, and Nightlight does not stop Apollo, it is something he will certainly have to get used to seeing if he ever hosts a ball at the Celestial City, where months-long orgies are relatively common.

Hearing the parade before they see it, the both of them feel excitement raise within them, the atmosphere is contagious. Giggling maids and young lads alike run out into the paths of the soldiers, appearing as a dense line of armoured, gleaming bodies, tossing roses and perfumes, shouting bawdy invites that cause roars of laughter to sweep over the watching throng, pressing eagerly towards the barriers like a human swarm. The soldiers do not break rank, but Nightlight sees smiles on their faces and laughter in their eyes, lit up by the adulation of their wives, brothers, sisters, husbands, mothers and fathers. The measured stamp of their armoured boots are like an arrhythmic counterpoint to Nightlight's drumming heartbeat and he finds himself clutching the porch step for support as they march, the young of an upcoming war, the wheat ready to be cut.

So distracted is he in the swelling of the mood that he momentarily loses track of Apollo – and in that instant, his young charge slips his control. Apollo ducks and weaves through the crowd, the shining whiteness of his hair like a pale beacon as he breaks out into the open road.

Faced by the solid, unwavering line of marching soldiers coming towards him, Apollo freezes. Nightlight feels a shout rise inside of him, horrified thoughts of Apollo being mown down, run over playing through his mind.

The young boy, standing frozen in shock before the wall of silver and gold metal, the hafts of their pikes glinting like stars in the sky, is so small, and the crowd reacts with jeers and shouts. Nightlight, ignored, lurches to his tsarevich's rescue, and then stops short, the breath robbed of him in shock.

A soldier breaks formation and jogs a little ahead of the others, out in front. He leans and sweeps up Apollo in his arms, and as silence grips the startled crowd, his rough laugh rings out, bright and infectious.

Apollo's hands rest on the soldier's armoured shoulders, and the Tsarevich's startled eyes meet the soldier's own, spinning and reflecting the light of the swirling galaxies around them, and the world around the pair fades into a meaningless tinnitus, flashes of colour. Apollo's body lights up with white fire, fire that swirls around the soldier's body without harming him, fire that ripples in pennants from Apollo's body as the soldier, mindless with wine on his breath and brilliance in his eyes, swings him around. Apollo is so light that he is no burden to him. None but Nightlight see the fire, none but Nightlight are so attuned to Lunanoff magic, but Nightlight sees it, sees Apollo unconsciously redirect it, sees the fire sink down beneath the soldier's armour, thrilling through every vein and pumping artery the nameless soldier possesses.

The soldier drops Apollo on his feet at the side of the road, rejoining his comrades with laughter still bubbling from his lips like overfilled champagne. Nightlight pushes his way to Apollo, who is shellshocked and entranced in a dreamlike haze, his lips moving without sense.

“I felt it,” says Apollo softly. “I felt everything. I felt – his heart, and his brain, and his blood...” He shudders, as if taken by cold, and a strange, mad fervour lights up his eyes. “He was hurting, Nightlight,” he confesses raspily, as if it is a great secret. “His back was cut all over, in lines, like...” He searches for vocabulary he does not know, and Nightlight winces. Of course Apollo finds the soldier who has been likely whipped for disobedience.

“They were fresh,” Apollo murmurs, and something intense colours the way he looks at Nightlight, looks _through_ Nightlight. “I don't want him to be hurt!” he says, “I don't want him to be hurt – and I could fix it, I could-”

His fists clench and white fire blossoms, but this fire does not ravage or hurt or burn – this fire burns bright with warmth and gentleness and healing. Nightlight stares in astonishment. “I'll learn, I'll learn how to fix people,” whispers Apollo, and starts to laugh, hysterically. That insane, brilliant glow has not faded, and Nightlight feels his own heart beat faster at the sight of it. This is what makes the Lunanoffs, what binds them and breaks them – the madness that pounds through them surefire as damnation. And Apollo is mad, as mad as they come.

 


	4. middle

All good things must come to an end; Apollo is imprisoned once more in the compound on Lyncis II, and he is fourteen before Nightlight sees him again.

Amma is oddly quick to open the doors, and sprightlier than he has seen her before. Though still wrinkled, still old, there is a energy and wellbeing in her movements that is new, and a lessening of the distaste in her voice when she speaks of the boy she keeps prisoner. Descending the stone steps, Nightlight wonders what Apollo has done to win her over. He has not forgotten those last, feverish days when he saw Apollo last, the strange new passion for healing that had gripped him so intensely.

Apollo’s voice rings out commandingly in the hall of black bare stone, powerful, clear and demanding respect even before Nightlight sees him.. Nightlight hovers just behind an old warped pillar, peering curiously through the bars.

Apollo is dictating something to Alysea, who scribbles diligently in a notebook. The space around them is filled with bits of paper - scrawled over with notes and hasty diagrams. A rat is discarded over the table, its stomach neatly cut open to show the body inside. Apollo, confident and assured in his topic, stands surrounded by towering stacks of books, some personal notebooks, others guides on anatomy and healing that Nightlight recognises from the most prestigious libraries.

His clothes are rumpled and it looks as if he has forgotten to shower; there is a splash of ink on his hem and his eyes are wild. He stands there, an incredibly detailed diagram held to his chest, his white hair, tousled through with black, in a disarray, words clear, concise and expert.

Nightlight, watching him, feels a great pride. If only Tsar Asterion could see his son now, explaining complex magical applications of healing with security, understanding, and at only fourteen. If only Tsar Asterion could see his son, and not immediately dismiss his burgeoning interest.

Nightlight announces himself, and as expected, Apollo’s eyes light up, though he skips any manner of greeting in favour of ordering Nightlight to come in at once - Apollo has something he _must_ show Nightlight - Alysea, fetch the knife.

Nightlight is ushered inside Apollo’s gilded cage, amused and curious. He seats himself, awkwardly, on the carpet, idly dragging his fingertips through the thick, silky brown fibres. His armour clicks as it rubs together, and he winces an apology. Apollo doesn’t seem to care, preoccupied as he is rummaging through his stacks of books for something.

Alysea returns, and Nightlight squints at her. Perhaps it is the light, but her skin seems sallower than before, her eyes a little brighter. She scowls at him, and his suspicion deepens, there is definitely something wrong with her that is new.

"Give me that," says Apollo, holding his hand out absently for the knife. Alysea places it in his palm, and for a moment, their fingers brush and the two glance at each other, Alysea's dark eyes meeting Apollo's pale, clear ones.

There is a brief pause, and Nightlight feels it necessary to clear his throat.

The two young people jump in surprise, as if they have forgotten he is there. Cheeks heating in a racing blush, Apollo curls his fingers around the knife and jerks it away, avoiding looking at either Alysea or Nightlight. Alysea glares stiffly at Nightlight, though her cheeks look a little red too.

Nightlight smiles sweetly. Young love is always so sensitive.

Coughing a little, Apollo mutters, "Er, thanks. Alysea. That is." He goes a little pinker, and quickly tries to get the topic back to the matter at hand. "Alright." He lifts the knife and aims the point over his upper arm.

"'Lo!" Alysea interjects, startling forwards, "You know you find it a little harder on yourself-" She touches his arm, and for a moment her taciturn face is full of gentle worry.

"-I was only showing Nightlight, it'll only be for a second-" Apollo responds, looking irritated, and Nightlight, having guessed his intention, shakes his head and pulls the knife away. With quick, practised movements, he makes a small incision on his own palm, proffering it to Apollo.

Apollo stares at him. "Nini, you didn't have to do that," he says uneasily, and Nightlight smiles at him and nods. He is the protector of the Lunanoffs, Tall and Small, and what sort of protector allows his charge to deliberately injure themselves over something so minor?

Swallowing nervously, Apollo takes Nightlight's hand, closing his eyes to concentrate. He is evidently unsure now, with a new audience, and nothing seems to be happening. His brows crease suddenly in disappointment and frustration, but Alysea, reading his symptoms, crouches behind him and splays her hands over his torso.

Apollo inhales sharply, and she presses her lips to his ear. "Concentrate," she whispers, and moves her hands just above his skin, as if she is directing an invisible flow of energy only the two of them can see.

Nightlight watches, fascinated, as Apollo's body lights up under her attention - literally, a soft glow seeping out from his skin. His eyes open, and they are brilliant white, his power mustered.

He jerks his head, and she steps away. Perhaps it is Nightlight's imagination, but he sees a lock of Alysea's hair turn grey, and a jolt of foreboding shoots through his spine. Moonmagic, there is no other explanation. How has Apollo managed to create a budding Mage from a shy Lyncian serving girl?

The matter falls from his mind when Apollo takes in one more settling breath, and then snaps the fingers of his free hand. A spark of magic leaps from his fingers, and he scowls in annoyance. It takes him a few more clicks before he has enough magic surrounding him, and then upon the final snap, it catches fire.

Flames ignite instantly in his fist, gentle flames that lick and lap at his skin with all the tender caresses of a lover. The white fire travels up his arm, around his head and in his hair, like a fiery halo, and then down his other arm.

Apollo places his other hand over Nightlight's bleeding palm, surrounding the wound from both sides with warm bright light.

There is no malice in the fire, no rage or pain, simply a relaxing, lazy feeling, as if Nightlight has slathered his nerves with honey. His muscles unwind and his mind sharpens, fatigue from the journey falling away as if he has come back from a particularly restful holiday. At the same time, stray zaps and zings of more potent, destructive magic play at being unleashed, lighting him up from inside like a conducting rod in a lightning storm. Still, though, they are more energising than uncomfortable.

At Apollo's command, the fire sinks low into the flesh of Nightlight's hand, a curious tickling feeling as if Apollo is scanning his entire body from the inside. There is another pause, and then it begins; oddly ticklish and slightly invasive, the muscles of his hand twitch and jump, and his blood runs slightly hotter and faster. Seamlessly, muscle and flesh knit back together and unmarked skin flows over the top. Once any feeling of the cut is gone, Apollo remains a moment longer, checking for any residual damage.

He sits back and releases the magic, an oddly pained expression flickering over his face as he wrests back control from the beast inside. Apollo opens his eyes, excitement brightening his face. "It worked!" he exclaims.

Nightlight stares down at his hand in wonder, healed as if it were never hurt. He grins in pride, and Apollo blushes boyishly at his approval. Alysea touches Apollo's shoulder for a moment, words passing between them silently. She releases him and smiles faintly, and he seems to flourish at the sight.

"It's all in the emotions," he says, in a tone a little close to bragging, but Nightlight thinks he's entitled to a little self-confidence. "You have to concentrate on wanting them to get better, feel it, feed it until it's the only thing you desire. And then all you have to do is search out that place inside, and push that feeling... and let it release. Once it's out, it's just a matter of offering the energy to speed the process of healing already in place."

"Well done, 'Lo," says Alysea softly, and Apollo smiles gently at her, catching her hand.

"I couldn't have done it without you then," he defers, and they both allow themselves a moment to look at each other, before Apollo lets her go and clears his throat awkwardly.

Nightlight shakes his head. He is very glad that his tendency to stay out of that sort of thing has served him so well over the years.

"Ever since Rhea III, when we met that soldier, I've been trying to do this," says Apollo intently to Nightlight, who nods understandingly. "I don't know where that hurt soldier went - probably dead if what Alysea tells me about the war is true. But if we are at war, I want to be able to help!"

Nightlight's smile falters a little at that, with concern. He does not like to think of Apollo, so young, preparing himself for war.

"And this," Apollo continues, gesturing around himself, at the stacks of books, "this can help people. I've accepted that I'll never be able to control myself like Father wants," his voice shakes and his eyes shine, but Nightlight is not cruel enough to call him out on the lie, "But this is surely good too? Using my powers to help rather than to destroy?"

Nightlight beams. Apollo doesn't seem reassured, so he leans forward and takes the boy's face in his hands, angling their foreheads so they rest together. Then he smiles, as big and bright as he can, and nods vigorously. He thinks Apollo is doing a good thing. A very brave thing.

"I'm going to be Tsar one day," Apollo tells him. "I'm going to be a Tsar, and I don't want to be a useless one. I'm going to make a difference to people. What's the point in having powers like this if they don't help anyone?"

His eyes are burning again, with fire and passion and Lunanoff insanity. "As a Tsarevich," Apollo asks, "as a future god in the eyes of my people, don't I have a duty to make sure I use the powers I have to ease their suffering?"

 


	5. end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> child abuse physical and verbal  
> derogatory language  
> nastiness  
> be warned

Tsarevich Apollo is fifteen years old, and he is due to meet his mother and father for the very first time since the fatal accident in the Towers of the Moon's palatial gardens. Tsar Asterion has expressed some, if mild, interest in his son's purported gift for healing, and requests a demonstration - an opportunity which Apollo jumps at to show his improved control, in the hopes Tsar Asterion will reverse his decision to outcast his son.

Nightlight has his doubts, but he dares not say anything lest it ruin the hope in Apollo's eyes. Still, after all this time, Apollo looks to his father for praise and validation. It is a sad thing to witness.

The journey from the isolated compound on Lyncis II has been long, torturous, and dull for Nightlight, with nothing to do but press his hands longingly to the plexiglass screen shielding them from the cold of deep space, watching the brilliant lines of star pilots shooting past, or listening to Apollo's screams as his magic destroys his mind during the trip.

It is worth it all though, for the Apollo and Alysea's reaction to the city-planet of the Constellations' capital, the Celestial City. Even Alysea, quiet and unimpressed with most things, gapes in visible awe and whispers a soft, "Oh, 'Lo, look!"

He is far more animated than she, grabbing her hand and forcibly towing her around the different viewports of the courier ship, begging the captain to let them go above-deck. He refuses, and Alysea's giggles drift along behind them as Apollo all but explodes in indignant excitement.

Nightlight watches with a tender eye, happy to see Apollo enjoying himself. Alysea appears to have decided on the 'port with the best view, and stands in front of it, her hand loosely grasping Apollo's in a casual intimacy that is neither noticed nor obtrusive to either of them, while they marvel at all the things they can see.

Towering buildings of white marble and moonstone stab towards the whirling nebulae, shaded in colours of copper and acid green, tinting the sky as if it were seen through the glass of a green bottle. The sun flames high and powerful in the sky, lazy lidless heat soaking through the streets and encouraging the thronging common-folk to discard clothing. Ventilated skimmers, for the rich, zip in and out of private tunnels in into tall, thin private mansions that no doubt continue far down into the bedrock.

All of this, though, is nothing compared to the Towers of the Moon, and a deep hush descends when Apollo sees his ancestral home, the thin pale spires, slender and straight like willow trunks, jabbing the sky in sharp lines, the tubes of the gardens winding around and between them like a sluggish greenish snake, the tallest towers topped with milky cupolas, observatories and studies, private bedrooms for the most elite residents. He stares at it, thirstily, this birthright and childhood that has been denied to him, and Alysea links her arms around his waist and leans her head on his shoulder, telling him, "You belong here, 'Lo."

Apollo is silent when they enter, and silent as they wait in the hall for Tsar Asterion to allow them entry to the throne room. The throne that Apollo will one day inhabit.

Everything in the Towers of the Moon is luxuriously decorated. There is no free space, another piece of fabulous artwork crawls up the walls, a fresco by a famed artist, tiny pieces of brilliantly coloured tiles spanning a mosaic. The gilt, the wealth, is almost oppressively overwhelming, Apollo and Alysea, in the simple, hardy clothes of Lyncis II's best, look so out of place it is embarrassing, and there is no doubt that Apollo at least is aware of it. Self-consciously, he tries to pull at the hem of his shirt, smooth the wrinkles from the journey, swipe back his hair. Alysea touches his shoulder silently, and he stops with a guilty flush.

The emotionless guard at the door slams the haft of his mattock against the ground, once, twice, and a hollow boom reverberates through their feet. There is a long, fraught pause.

Nightlight glances worriedly at Apollo, wondering how he will take this. The tsarevich is breathing fast, and his face is pale and shiny with anxious sweat. He looks terrified. By jarring contrast, Alysea looks calm and collected, her dark eyes hiding any emotion, though her skin is greyer than ever and she cannot be blind to the hisses of the few people they have seen as they walk past - _"Is that a moonmage? With our prince?"_

The great doors creak threateningly, then one of the guards slowly pull it open from the inside. Apollo inhales, and squares his shoulders. Nightlight smiles at him, and deliberately steps behind him. Apollo is his superior here, after all, even if he doesn't believe it.

The throne room is toweringly tall, but surprisingly narrow and short, they are in a conical tower, after all. Rich tapestries and thick rugs woven with intricate detail cover the glaring white floors, and windows of stained glass cast colourful patterns over the courtiers who move in near-silent circles around the edges of the throne room, ornate chairs and plump sofas provided for their comfort, the glittering gleam of star-servants winding their way through with refreshments on silver platters.

It is a display of the most ostentatious wealth, yet it is clear the tapestries and patterns have been selected with a critical and cautious eye, since the room's natural beauty is no way diminished by the additions - no, they harken to the flutelike pillars, spiralling up with depictions of the races, the arched and vaulted ceiling, the beautiful stonework that created moonstone into some liquid form, smooth curves and no edges. The entire room glows faintly.

At the far end, looms a great throne, square blocks of pale marble, contrastingly simple but forceful in its simplicity. And upon that, sits Tsar Asterion, a hawkish man moving into later middle-age, black-haired touched at the roots with grey and sharp, calculating blue eyes like chips of flinty ice. He is garbed in simple finery, and at his side, stands Tsarina Nevaeh, a pretty primrose dressed in white and decorated with pearls, drinking in the sight of her son as if she truly has been barred from him all these years.

Apollo strides, the heels of his boots clicking on the patches of stone. The courtiers murmur as he passes, appreciative things, the line of his calves, the pride in his tilted chin, his Lunanoff features. A beautiful prince more surprising for his absence.

Apollo stops once he reaches three-quarters of the way towards the throne, and then, in a voice that halts all other speech, says, "May the stars shine upon you, Father, Mother."

A ripple goes through the courtiers, and Nightlight, dropping to one knee as Alysea fully kneels beside him, winces. It is a well-veiled snub, not one that Apollo probably intentionally means to make, to address them by such familiar titles instead of Tsar and Tsarina. Nevaeh glances worriedly at her husband. Asterion's face is like stone.

"And light speak through you," Tsar Asterion intones, and his voice rumbles off the walls like thunder. A short, mocking pause, and then, _"Ah-poll-oh."_ Carefully enunciating the name seems to pick it apart, make it an insult.

Nightlight watches Apollo's shoulders stiffen, but he does not react otherwise.

"My son." Tsar Asterion's voice carries with ease. "I have not seen you for some time. How old are you now - twelve, thirteen? I seem to remember you had your birthday recently."

Apollo's jaw knots. "Fifteen," he spat, and a titter sweeps through the courtiers. A flush of humiliation spreads up his cheeks.

"Ah, my mistake," says Tsar Asterion unconcernedly. He looks Apollo over critically and seems displeased by what he finds, and by the look on Apollo's face, he is fully aware of it.

Nightlight feels awful, second-hand embarrassment crawling and twisting in his stomach. He can only imagine how Apollo is feeling right now, with the cruel reality thrown in the face of his hopes. It is not at all how Apollo expected it to go.

"My - Father." Apollo stumbles over his words in his nervousness, caught between addressing Asterion as a father or as a Tsar, and his voice cracks, sheers embarrassingly high. Red is all too visible on his pale face, and the courtiers laugh again, the disdainful murmur of their comments a harsh backdrop. Apollo quickly clears his throat, and begins again, doggedly trying to salvage something from the disastrous audience, even though Tsar Asterion has somewhat lost interest, turning to the servant beside him and ordering more wine in his powerful voice, completely cutting over his son.

"Father!" Apollo almost shouts, and shakes when Tsar Asterion, visibly annoyed, looks back at him. "You called me here today - to - to have me show you my power. Of healing."

Nevaeh sighs a little and smiles beatifically at Apollo, who gazes at her with a searching desperation, hoping for help against the impenetrable wall of his father. She blows him a small kiss.

"Oh yes," says Tsar Asterion absently, "Did someone remember to bring an injured person?"

The courtiers laugh uproariously, and Tsar Asterion frowns faintly in evident confusion, clearly not having meant it as a joke. Nonetheless, Apollo has to bow his head quickly, insecurity and shame worming in at his vulnerable heart.

Alysea shifts restlessly beside Nightlight. Ignored, they still have not been acknowledged, and Nightlight can only imagine how difficult it must be for her to watch her beloved friend be so belittled and defenceless while she is barred from helping him.

"My Tsar," says a man, bald and old-looking, with spectacles and pale robes - Nightlight recognises him as councilman Admetus, "I took the liberty of arranging a visit from a man with blindness. He agrees to Tsarevich Apollo's demonstration, and has accepted regardless of risk."

His voice, very kind and respectful, not to mention his obvious sympathy when he looks at Apollo, serves to make the boy relax a little, and still pale-faced, he offers a tight-lipped and anxious smile.

"Well, bring him out then," says Tsar Asterion dismissively, leaning back in his throne and sipping at his refilled wine cup, looking thoroughly bored with the proceedings. The courtiers, picking up on the message, begin to turn their interest to other things, and the chatter picks up as more than half the hall begins to completely ignore Apollo.

Nightlight has had enough at this point, and rises on his own. He smiles at Alysea, who takes the cue and stands up as well. Longingly, she hesitates, obviously wanting to stand beside Apollo and comfort him. Nightlight shakes his head slightly. Apollo has to do this by himself if he wants the slightest chance of earning Tsar Asterion's respect.

Admetus supports the blind man gently down to where Apollo is standing. The man is fairly young, neatly dressed and well-presented, and when Apollo introduces himself, his answer is courteous and smooth. Evidently not a poor man, then.

"And you have agreed to this of your own free will?" asks Apollo, authoritative now, and the blind man nods.

"Yes, my Tsarevich," he replies.

"What is your name?" Apollo continues, and the man says,

"My name is Aquarius Helion Dubrask."

"Very well, Helion, if you would not mind kneeling in front of me - Alysea, if you would?" Apollo says, absently pulling off his gloves.

Upon the raised dais of the throne, Asterion frowns slightly, noticing the colouration of Alysea's skin and the easy way Apollo addresses her.

Guiding Helion to his knees before Apollo, Alysea steps back, offering Apollo a faint, encouraging smile. He inhales, taking heart from her smile, and swallows one last time.

"This may feel a little uncomfortable," says Apollo, and lightly lays his fingers on Helion's forehead, who stiffens a little at the touch, a bit of nervousness twisting across his expression. Apollo closes his eyes, and a furrow of concentration deepens his brow.

There is a long, expectant pause. Tsar Asterion has put his wine cup down. The courtiers quiet. Alysea waits.

The silence drags on, and on, and Apollo begins to sweat, his frown only deepening.

Nightlight clenches his fists. Curing blindness is a far cry from scrapes and knife wounds. Asterion has set his son up to fail.

The silence is abruptly torn by a sharp cry from the spectators. "Performance issues, tsarevich?" A woman shouts, and the room explodes into noisy laughter. Asterion smiles faintly and lifts his wine cup to drink.

Apollo jerks back from Helion, breathing fast and looking on the verge of fainting. Frustrated tears spring up in his eyes, and he blinks rapidly, hands curling into fists.

Helion opens his cloudy eyes. Cautiously, he says, "I don't see any difference."

"I'm sorry - I -" Apollo's voice cracks again and the courtiers jeer.

"He's just a little boy, send him home!"

Apollo ducks his head again and steps back, unable to bear the crushing weight of shame and failure. He swallows dryly and dashes tears from his face with a fist.

"No," Alysea mutters from beside Nightlight. "No." A pause, and then she shouts, loud enough to deafen Nightlight, _"NO!"_

Asterion puts his wine cup down with a definitive click, and says in a lethal tone, "I beg your pardon?"

Utter silence falls.

Alysea's hands clench into fists. " _You_ summoned him here, Tsar. You will watch him heal this man! He can do it. I know he can."

Tsar Asterion's eyebrow rises. "And you are?"

"My name is Alysea," she says, and the courtiers begin to laugh again - here is an orphan girl with only one name, belonging to no one and no thing, daring to speak in front of the Tsar! - but she raises her voice and shouts over them. "My name is Alysea!"

They quiet in the face of her defiance, shocked.

"You will watch," she tells him harshly. "All of you. Pay your future Tsar some _lightblasted RESPECT!"_

The courtiers begin to look rather uncomfortable, but no one dares talk. Asterion is scowling, but he gestures at Apollo sharply nonetheless.

"Well then, boy," he says coldly, "Your common bitch has spoken for you. Get on with it."

Apollo's spine prickles with anger, but at Alysea's chiding glare, he takes a deep breath and controls himself. Alysea turns and walks to stand behind Apollo once more, leaning up to whisper in his ear as she does. "Think of me, 'Lo," she murmurs, and Apollo swallows.

Nightlight watches, breath caught somewhere in his chest. He is not certain what to make of all of this. Asterion's anger is a great and terrible thing, and Alysea has put herself directly in the path of it to give Apollo another chance. It feels dangerous. It feels balanced on the precipice of too risky.

Apollo closes his eyes again, and places his fingers on Helion's brow. His face smooths out, and a faint smile of remembrance curls around his lips. He stands like that for a while, long enough that the courtiers begin to fidget again, casting nervous glances at Alysea, who stares only at Apollo, urging him on.

Then he snaps his fingers, and a spark leaps from them. Once again, twice more. Three, four, five, six.

On the seventh strike, a fire ignites.

Nightlight is not sure where the hushed gasp of amazement originates from, perhaps everywhere, perhaps nowhere, he is too transfixed by the sight of Apollo's entire body lighting up in a gentle flame, white fire that even now reminds him of the terrible carnage in the gardens of the Towers when Apollo was only a boy. But he is no longer a boy, and now his fire is kind, warm thing, flowing all around him in near-silent crackling lines, like peaceful lightning - ten thousand and one oxymorons.

The peace and happiness on Apollo's face is unmatched as he opens his eyes - they are white, glowing brightly with power - and taps Helion's forehead once.

Helion convulses, and Nightlight knows all too well what he is feeling - nerves and triggers played all at once by a curious outside hand, intrusive and deeply baring. But also that liquid reassurance, like sun-warmed honey, soaking into everything.

The rapturous fire lasts seconds, maybe half a minute at best, and when Apollo releases it, steps back, the light seems to go out of the room, leaving it dreary and cold.

Helion is shaking his head, blinking rapidly. "I..." he says, stumbling and shocked. "I..." His eyes are bright and clear, and as he looks around, he begins to cry. "I... I can see - " He lurches for Apollo and throws his arms around the Tsarevich's shins, pressing effusive kisses onto his boots. "Thank you, my lord, thank you, thank you," he babbles, and Apollo coughs a little awkwardly.

"You're... welcome?" he tries, seeming a little overcome himself, and Helion blinks up at him, tears still streaming down his cheeks.

"My lord, you are the most radiant thing I have ever seen," Helion says devoutly, and then, "Praise be to the Light!"

The courtiers around them take up the call, and eyes wide, Apollo staggers back as suddenly a room full of perfect strangers who had, only moments before, been mocking and belittling him, fall to their knees worshipfully. His actions have sparked a rapture, and it is beginning to panic him.

His face turns grey with shock at the realisation of what he has done. Drained, Apollo grabs for support, but Alysea is already there, pulling his arm over her shoulders and hugging him as hard as she can, squeezing him so tightly it is as if she wishes to pull them into one being, pride and warmth in her face.

He looks at her, and there is a tearful smile on his face. "Thank you," he says, and she reaches up and kisses him, hard, impetuously.

Apollo goes rigid in shock, and immediately she lets go and almost jumps back, and embarrassed flush heating her cheeks as the courtiers whoop and cry out bawdy things. Alysea bows her head, embarrassed, but pleased.

Apollo grins, and his eyes sparkle brilliantly. "I knew you liked me," he laughs, and she glares at him.

"Only when you're not being an idiot," Alysea snarls back scathingly, and Nightlight sniggers at the offended look on Apollo's face.

Tsar Asterion stands, and says calmly, "Enough."

Instantly, the atmosphere deflates. Nightlight gulps in fear. Apollo squares his shoulders and looks his father in the eye.

Asterion begins to walk down towards him. "So you healed a blind man." Pause, a careless twitch of the lips. "Good enough, I suppose. Even if it did take you a while."

Apollo begins to relax.

"But," snaps Asterion, "I am confused on one thing."

"Father?" asks Apollo, looking slightly more nervous now that Asterion is so close. "What-"

His words trail off into silence as Asterion interrupts him, his pale eyes cold with deep rage. "I thought I had a son, not a daughter." Asterion looks him over with obvious contempt.

Apollo flinches, confusion in his eyes and shame flushing his cheeks. "Father I don't-"

"You let her speak for you," Asterion cuts over him, gesturing at Alysea. "Some common bred brat. It would have almost been excusable, if she was worth being considered a human."

Rage stiffens Apollo's spine. "What are you sa-"

"Do not interrupt me!" Asterion shouts, and Apollo is silent. "A moonmage. A filthy, ugly little moonmage common brat. And this is the voice of the future Tsar we are all supposedly due respect to." His lip curls up in a sneer. "You are the weakest and most pitiful excuse for a son I have ever seen."

No one dares speak up. Not even Nightlight, who knows his place too well to interfere. He turns his head away, unable to watch.

All save, that is, Alysea.

She is brimming with rage, her eyes spark and flash. There is the throb of potential around her, magic urging to be unleashed. "No," she snarls angrily, "THAT is enough!" Reacting on instinct, she lifts her hand up and suddenly black, shadowy lightning flares out of her fingertips, sailing harmlessly over Asterion's head and hitting the wall.

Alysea stumbles, her face grey with shock and tiredness. She sinks to her knees, and her eyes turn pale, pallid gold, a moonmage unveiled in full. Even Apollo then steps back, horror in his eyes.

Asterion's face is ugly with anger. "Once I can tolerate you insulting me, once I can even bear you touching my son with your filthy, polluted hands. But this? Using that repellent magic in these sacred halls in an attempt to attack me?" He strides towards her, and Alysea, dazed, is helpless.

"Father no - it was an accident-!" Apollo yells, springing forward, but before he can do anything, Nevaeh rushes down from the platform and embraces her son, wrestles him struggling away from Asterion. Asterion's lip curls to see Apollo's weakness - he is unable to fight off his own mother.

"Please, baby, you've just got to let him do what he wants," Nevaeh whispers, "Please baby, I'm just trying to protect you -"

"Let go!" Apollo storms.

Helpless, he is forced to watch as Asterion grabs Alysea's hair, wrenching her head up. He sneers in disgust as she squeaks in pain, but is too exhausted from the unexpected magic to struggle. His fist clenches and his eyes begin to glow - and the strangest thing happens.

Alysea's hair begins to turn grey and brittle at the roots, and her eyes sag. Her mouth downturns and her cheeks begin to wrinkle and prune. Her back twists and bends, her body shakes, and age begins to claim her before their very eyes - in an instant, from a young, youthful girl of fifteen, she begins to wither into a hunched crone, choking on yellowed teeth with bleary, faded eyes lost under the weight of wrinkles. Her mouth opens and closes, and a thin high scream comes out, raspy and worn.

"ALYSEA!" Apollo cries, and Asterion releases her, watching the hunched crone scrabble at the floor. The courtiers scream in horror at her decrepitude, and Alysea looks up, and sees her reflection in the gleaming polish of the white throne.

She screams and claws at her face with long, haglike nails, jerks back and scrambles to her feet. She sways, this freakshow, with tears streaming down her withered cheeks and her curse written in her skin, then turns and dashes away, the great doors closing with a boom behind her.

"ALYSEA!" Apollo roars, fighting like a man possessed. A kick frees him from Nevaeh's restraining embrace, and he charges after Alysea, desperation in his eyes.

Asterion trips him, and Apollo sprawls over the floor. "Be glad!" the Tsar shouts over Apollo's cries of Alysea's name, "She was making you weak. I left you under your mother's influence for too long, look at you!" He stamps hard on Apollo's stomach, and Apollo curls over and gags on vomit.

Nightlight stands there with his eyes closed and wishes there is something he could do.

"You're pathetic," Asterion snarls. "We are at war! I do not need some weak healer for a son, I need a warrior! It is my mistake, I suppose, I should have let you be yourself far sooner rather than locking you away. Do not forget, son, I have seen your magic before. You are no healer. You're a killer! A destroyer. And that is what you will become!"

Apollo spits at him, and Asterion kicks him in the face, breaking Apollo's nose. Blood gushes down Apollo's face, ruining the fine rug.

"Tonight you leave this place and go to the Peveret system. You know the place," orders Asterion. "I think its time that you learned how to be something useful.”

 

 


	6. blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings - I’m not even sure what to warn... blood, death mentions, abusive people in authority, rape mention, whipping and corporal punishment

Nightlight remembers leaving Tsarevich Apollo at the military facility his father ordered him to attend vividly. 

Apollo was still pale and shaky from the journey, weak and whimpering, and had only just finished throwing up in the cubicles from fear. His eyes were glassy and rimmed red, his body hollow and wracked from hunger - he was refusing to eat since Alysea had been driven away, and neither of them had seen her since. His voice was torn and hoarse from screaming.

He'd clutched close to Nightlight as the ramp had gone down, and whispered with bloodshot, sleepless eyes, "I can't kill something. Father wants me to become a killer Nightlight I can't do this please-!"

Nightlight had been helpless to do anything as Apollo wept into his armoured shoulder, fifteen but suddenly so young still. Apollo's defiance had not mattered when the guards that had accompanied them from the Towers of the Moon to the Peveret system, to the private training facility on Rhea I, not the recruitment barracks on the other continent, had wrestled him from the ship and beaten him into compliance. They were rough, but Apollo was rougher, and fought like a wildcat.

Not once did his fire make an appearance, Nightlight remembers that, but most clearly of all he remembers the man who, having strolled calmly out of one of the low, pine buildings, had punched Apollo in the face without so much of a pause, and had knocked him out. The man, with a thin, cold smile, had lifted Apollo's unconscious body over his shoulder, nodded at Nightlight, and walked off.

That is the last Nightlight sees of Apollo for years, and when he returns, he does not recognise him.

Nightlight, arriving on Rhea I, inquires where Apollo might be found, full of eagerness to see his tsarevich again after all these years. He wonders how Apollo has grown. He wonders if he is anything like he is remembers.  
He can't quite control his instinctive shock and hurt when he is abruptly told that Apollo is out hunting with his archery instructor, Orion, and is not due back for some hours. 

Apollo must have known that Nightlight is coming today, and he has chosen to go out hunting and leave anyway. Since when does Apollo like to hunt? Nightlight begins to fear that this has done exactly as Tsar Asterion wishes - perhaps this facility really has broken Apollo of his gentleness, of his healer's heart.  

He doesn't know which is worse, the thought of Apollo suffering the consequences of his defiance for this long, or Apollo losing all that has given him comfort in the dark cage on Lyncis II.

Opting to go out looking for Apollo rather than await his return, Nightlight uses his superior senses and rather handy sensitivity to Lunanoff magic to track Apollo. He picks his way through a deep green forest, so dark and dim that the light shades blue and the denizens of the forest have slightly glowing eyes.  

More than once, Nightlight startles one of the many vixxa wandering through this lush forest, feeling their way around with their snuffling whiskers. They are long, cat- and doe-like creatures, striped in greens and blues, with pale, near-sighted eyes and a long, sinuous tail for balance, and tend to have gentle, friendly temperaments. He pats one comfortingly, and feels much reassured when it leans its whiskery nose trustingly into his hand.

That is, of course, until an arrow almost impales him.

He jerks back with a startled glow, the arrowhead clattering off his armour. The vixxa screams in fright and bounds over the fallen logs, pursued by a charging hunter, on foot and frightfully fast.

Nightlight blinks in shock as an unmistakeable tingle chimes in his centre in recognition. A Lunanoff - born and bred, this is Apollo.

But this is not the Apollo Nightlight remembers. There is no fastidiously clean, diffident boy, shy and faltering and clutching onto Alysea for support. This is no pale-faced, stuttering mess, curling around chains in an effort to cage his nature. 

This Apollo streaks through the trees like a lean blur, a bow strapped over his back and intensity in his cold hard eyes. His body is smeared with mud and there are leaves in his hair; he wears only rough clothes, doeskin leggings and soft boots, a ragged hemp shirt. He is fast, his steps quick and sure, and when he raises his bow to shoot the creature he is hunting, it is a smooth and polished action, born of no hesitation.

For a second he stills with the arrowshaft against his cheek and the bowstring taut, and then he releases. The arrow speeds through the air and buries itself in the vixxa's left leg, causing it to stumble and fall with a shriek of pain.

A few more of those quick light steps, then Apollo kneels and draws a shining blade over the animal's neck, ending its misery in a quick, clean kill. Blood splatters over his forearms. Apollo doesn't seem to care, indeed, for an instant, Nightlight swears he sees Apollo's lips twitch into the smooth pull of a smirk. Pride, perhaps, at his kill, he seems smug enough at any rate, lifting his shaggy head of black-white hair to peer off into the darkened trees expectantly, as if awaiting something.

A man steps out, and Nightlight's gut clenches coldly. It is the same man who took Apollo from the guards when he was first brought here, a handsome man, relatively young, with stubble on his tanned cheeks and pleasing dark eyes, though they are instructable and hard. His body is muscled and thick, and he moves with the easy grace of the assured hunter, arrogance in his cold, small smile when he looks at Apollo, crouching by the dead vixxa.

"Took you long enough," says Orion, for this must be him, "I saw at least seven opportunities to get him up at Droughtsman Rock." He has a good voice, too, strong, but with a rough burr, and his attitude is not entirely joking.

"It's difficult to shoot straight whilst running," Apollo responds, and Nightlight shakes his head. Apollo's voice has dropped completely, leveled into a surprisingly pleasant tenor, mellow and cool.

They both ignore Nightlight, and Nightlight wonders if they have even noticed him, fallen as he is in a thorny patch of nettles. He begins extricating himself irritably.

Apollo draws out his knife again to begin butchering the beast, moving with quick, efficient cuts that show the dint of much practice.

"You managed it, though," says Orion, and Nightlight feels himself bristling a little when the hunstman carelessly grabs Apollo's hair and flicks a bit of dirt into his face. Apollo does not react, but simply waits with downcast eyes to be allowed to return to his task. "Not just a pretty face, eh, boy?"

Apollo snorts lowly. "You know me, sir."

Orion chuckles, but the sound is cold, and Apollo flinches, knowing he is on tenterhooks. "You're right, you're right. Sweet singing stars, where would you be if you couldn't use your pretty little mouth to get you out of trouble?"

Apollo freezes. Nightlight can see him shake slightly, knowing that something is about to go wrong. Orion looks at him, then shakes his head and laughs a little.

"Ah, you silly bastard," he says warmly, his voice and stance completely at odds to his words, "Why the fuck didn't you expect me to find out that you took that maid down from the whip post last night?"

Apollo grits his teeth and doesn't answer.

"See, boy, I'm thinking you might be getting a little complacent, see. And you better fucking know I took you out here for a reason."

Apollo swallows. "Sir," he says, in a shaky voice. He looks up at Orion, and Nightlight shudders at what he sees there - some twisted, wide-eyed worship, desperate for validation from this ugly, arrogant man.

It makes no sense. Rationally, Apollo shouldn't look up to this man, symbolic of his captivity, of his indoctrination, of Tsar Asterion's attempts to mold his son into something he prefers. But Nightlight has not seen Apollo in years, and for years Apollo has lived and breathed under this man's total control.

It is a sick realisation. Nightlight has no idea what has been done to the young, sweet tsarevich since the last time he was permitted to guard him and keep him safe.

Orion raises his eyebrows. "Go on, boy, give me a fucking reason why you decided that what your opinion was is better than mine."

"The guards were talking about how they wanted a little fun with her, sir," Apollo says quietly. "And I knew, sir, that Davis was the most vocal. And I know that something only ever happens here when you order it, sir-"

"Damn right," agrees Orion. "Davis. That little son of a bitch. He not get enough punishment for roughing you up without my say-so last week, he thinks he can do it again?" He snorts, and pets Apollo's hair absently.

Apollo shudders.

"Eh, boy, don't worry. Won't let nasty old Davis touch your pretty face, eh? You'll need that for when you get into those fucking courts. Don't worry your fucking head an ounce. I'll go deal with him, and you bring this meat back," Orion says, kindly, and Nightlight wonders if perhaps his snap judgment was wrong about him. He seems to be looking out for Apollo - if only slightly. 

"Yes sir," murmurs Apollo subserviently. "Thank you sir."

Orion nods sharply, and strides off. A few steps further into the woods, he turns and calls over his shoulder, "Oh, and boy?”

Apollo, having barely relaxed, flinches again. "Sir?"

"I'm thinking fifteen lashes for your disobedience. Since you've been such a good boy recently," Orion shouts, and the forest rings with the sound of his laughter as he leaves.

Apollo bows his head to return to butchering the vixxa, inhaling once to square his shoulders and steady his hands. After a moment, he says softly, "Nightlight, you can come out now."

Nightlight creeps out of the nettle patch, his face full of concern. Upon seeing it, Apollo sighs heavily.

"Sorry," he says, pulling out the useless parts of the animal's gut and tossing the offal away. "It's impossible to do this cleanly." He offers Nightlight a tired, strained smile. "But it is good to see you again. You've not changed."

Nightlight touches Apollo's shoulder gently. It's not the vixxa he's worried about. 

"Don't worry about Orion," says Apollo, grunting as he gets involved in his work. "He's not bad if you do what you're told. He'll go easier on me than he says he will." 

But he avoids Nightlight's eyes, and Nightlight has seen enough bad children to know lying when he sees it. He gives Apollo a stern look. Apollo huffs frustratedly. 

"It's fine, Nightlight, don't worry about me." He pauses. "How is mother?"  
Nightlight nods warily. Nevaeh is well, as far as he knows. 

Something in Apollo's face relaxes, and he smiles a little. "That's good to hear."  
There is a brief pause, and then Apollo asks stiltedly, "And father?"  
Nightlight scowls, but nods again. Tsar Asterion is as healthy as ever. Nightlight has made sure of it.

Apollo only nods silently at that. Silence descends, but it is not awkward, only slightly unsure. After a while, Apollo says softly, "He was right you know."  
Nightlight blinks.

"Father," Apollo clarifies, seeing Nightlight's face. "I belong in this sort of place." He huffs out a tired, broken breath, and ruffles a bloodstained hand through his hair. "The blood, the hunting, the killing. You know, I refused to do it for the first six months. Threw up violently any time I was shown blood. And now it fucking excites me."

Nightlight frowns and wags his finger. Language!

Apollo shakes his head, bitter amusement quirking his lips. "Sorry," he drawls. The sarcasm falls off his face. "I can't even make the healing light anymore. So much for that."

Rocking back on his heels, Nightlight places a sympathetic hand on Apollo's shoulder. Apollo stares at him with sleepless, haunted eyes. What about Alysea, he thinks. Apollo cannot have forgotten her.

"Alysea doesn't matter anymore," Apollo mutters. "I got her into that mess. She's better off never seeing me again. The world is better off that way too, but sadly it doesn't have a choice. Here I am!" He throws his arms wide and laughs, kneeling there in his bloody glory with some sort of bitter madness in his pale eyes. 

Nightlight shakes his head rapidly. No, no, the world would never be better without Apollo in it - that is a silly thing to think!

His negation doesn't seem to reassure Apollo. "Orion's right, too. If I just did what I was told, I wouldn't have to be punished so much. It's not his fault that I just can't seem to stop failing at everything. I mean, I'm practically a lost hope, I don't know why Father hasn't given up on me already." Apollo leans over the dead vixxa and begins to laugh, long and hollow. "All I'm good for is a fucking pretty face." He looks sidelong at Nightlight and his soft lips twitch into a bitter laugh. "At least I've got a sweet mouth to complain out of, eh?"

He rises suddenly to his feet and slides the bow over his shoulder. "We're done here," he says, coldly, looking down at the remnants of the dead animal. 

Making sure a girl isn't raped is hardly something Apollo should be punished for, thinks Nightlight, and doesn't know if he's relieved that Apollo is so ill-suited to a life of bloody violence. He seems to crave Orion's approval, still desires to make his father proud of him, but equally is resigned to being a failure in his eyes for the rest of his life.

Nightlight clenches his fists as Apollo lopes off ahead of him, a bulging pack full of the stripped vixxa meat.

Tsar Asterion may have forced his son to learn how to kill, but he will never make him a killer.


	7. strike a match

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> corporal punishment, scars, humiliation, murder

Orion declares he is going with them to the Towers of the Moon.

Nightlight glances sidelong at Apollo, who stands looking at the dirt between his bare pale toes and avoiding Orion's eyes. The crew of the courier ship look anxiously to Nightlight, awaiting his orders.

Apollo's time is up, and Nightlight has come to collect him, on Tsar Asterion's order, to be brought back to the Towers of the Moon. The Tsar is most pleased with the reports Orion has been sending back about Apollo's progress and has already planned a formal ball and announcement recognising Apollo as his heir to the throne.

It is a cool day on Rhea I, and Nightlight can see gooseflesh chilling up and down Apollo's lean, thin body. He wears only too-big sackcloth trousers that billow around his slender legs and are shorn off at the knees, exposing his shapely calves and feet. The trousers are held up by a length of bloodstained leather that looks like it may have been the tail of a whip at some point. His hair is long and uncut, reaching down to the middle of his back, and unbrushed, snarled with knots. They have not allowed him to wear shoes or a shirt to leave, baring the ugly, half-healed scars on his back. Nightlight can count the knobbles of Apollo's vertebrae, the lines of his ribs, the jut of his hipbones. There is a ring of bruises around his throat and his wrists are chafed raw.

Nothing could be clearer, it is meant to shame Apollo, to parade him before the watching staff of the facility one last time. The barrack guards have laughed uproariously when Apollo crosses the tamped down earth in front of the landing field, steering well clear of the whipping post in the centre, and even now their mocking gaze lingers on Apollo's exposure, their rough voices calling bawdy in-jokes that make Apollo's jaw tighten.

Nightlight meets Orion's challenging stare flatly. The huntsman's handsome charms do not work on him, nor do his attempts to intimidate. Orion, by contrast to his royal charge, looks perfectly turned out, his buckskin trews are of good quality, his red stubble has been shaved off, gingery hair tied back in a ponytail with a leather thong. He wears a leather jerkin and an embroidered, obviously expensive belt, with a fine white shirt. It is clear he has expected this.

Nightlight shakes his head firmly, and Orion raises his eyebrows, evidently shocked that his order has been refused. Apollo looks up at Nightlight standing on the courier ship's ramp with disbelieving pale eyes. Smiling, Nightlight pointedly turns his back on Orion and gestures Apollo up the ramp.

Hesitating only for a moment, Apollo steps forward, his shoulders straightening and head lifting in a regal pride that immediately negates his sorry dress. Orion's hand drops heavily on his shoulder, and Apollo's spine bows inwards as if under a great weight. He goes no further.

"Look, you fucking glowworm," Orion says pleasantly, and brandishes an official looking document in front of Nightlight. "Orders of the Tsar to escort Face here to the Towers. Now get out of my fucking way, I want to leave this fucking planet before sundown and I heard Face has to be tied up for space flights."

Apollo goes rigid and his cheeks flush darkly as Orion's comment spurs a whole new round of jeering from their observers. Nightlight scowls. He can't go against Tsar Asterion's orders, but he'll be shadowbait if he lets Orion have control of Apollo for the journey. Apollo is already weak on journeys, and he doesn't need the added trauma.

He nods, plasters a smile on his face, and steps aside. Orion affixes a harsh grasp on Apollo's elbow and yanks the young man up the ramp after him, his glare making the crew scatter. Just in time, Nightlight sticks out his foot.

Orion stumbles and Nightlight lashes out with his lance, separating Apollo and Orion. Apollo shrinks behind Nightlight, who takes up a mildly aggressive stance. Orion's face flushes over with fury, and the members of the facility behind them go ominously silent.

Orion glares hellfire at Nightlight, who sticks his tongue out childishly. Orion's fist twitches, and for a moment Nightlight wonders if Orion is actually going to try to hit him. Evidently, common sense and memory of Nightlight's prowess on the battlefield wins out. The huntsman clears his throat, embarrassed behind his rage, then turns and stalks up the ramp without further words.

Apollo inhales shakily behind Nightlight, who turns and pats Apollo's elbow kindly, as if his gentleness can erase the red marks of Orion's roughness.

"You shouldn't have done that," the Tsarevich mutters. "He'll be in a foul mood the whole way there, now."

Nightlight raises his eyebrow and laughs silently, a glow brightening his cheeks and face. Does it look like he gives a single care about what some cruel bully thinks or feels? Nightlight touches Apollo's raw wrist with concern. His Tsarevich is the only thing that matters to him.

Apollo colours faintly and smiles ever so slightly, shyly, and Nightlight beams. "Thank you," Apollo murmurs, and after another brief pause, squares his shoulders and strides up the ramp after Orion. Nightlight, following obediently after, is pleased to see Apollo's bearing straighten and stiffen with pride once more.

The captain nods at Nightlight once they're in, smiling to see Apollo. He goes straight to his knees, and Apollo seems slightly flustered to be reminded that this is common courtesy to show to any Lunanoff. Nightlight politely requests time for Apollo to clean himself before the take-off, and the captain agrees readily for more time for himself and his crew to spend out in Rhea I's fresh air.

Nightlight, leading Apollo to the light chamber on board the ship, smiles faintly at the thought of Orion's annoyance at the delay. Apollo's pleasure when he is shown the clean, fine clothes Nightlight has brought, and the places for him to clean, makes it well-worth any reprecussions from setting off late.

Nightlight helps him, for Apollo's healing back is very tender and means that the lightscanner cannot be used at all, it is too abrasive. The ship's moonbot heals most of the damage, until faint, silvery scars are the only things that are left. Apollo rolls his shoulders languidly, his eyes half-lidded and warm with pleasure, and remarks slowly that he has not felt so good in such a long time.

After Apollo is healed and clean, sleepy from over-exposure to the healing light of the moonbots and dressed in the soft, comfortable but clearly expensive (stamped with the symbol of the Lunanoffs) clothes Nightlight has procured, Nightlight cuts his hair back to just-above shoulder length, and shaves the few stray hairs on Apollo's jaw. The Lunanoffs never did tend to grow much body-hair, and Apollo will only look ridiculous. Princely once more, Nightlight takes his hand and leads him down to the hold.

He fits Apollo into the padded restraints that have been made for him gently, stroking his tsarevich's bowed head and pressing loving butterfly kisses to his forehead and nose to make him giggle, half-drunk as he is on the healing light. Then Nightlight presses Dreamsand onto the pad of Apollo's tongue, and sings to him softly. Apollo falls in a deep, much needed sleep, healing from the hurts and burdens the last few years of his life has bestowed upon him.

Nightlight stands watch, as he has always done, as he will always do, keeping away the darkness and the hate and the bad dreams, until the moment they touch down at the Celestial City.

* * *

Apollo's eyes flutter the moment the smooth ripple of the ship slotting into the harbour's shocks reverberates through the ship. He wriggles in his restraints, then yawns, widely, the tip of his tongue furling out to touch the top of his lip. A roll of his shoulders makes his bones click, and then Apollo blinks up at Nightlight with bright silver eyes and grins.

He looks refreshed, his skin clear and his eyes bright, the weariness in his body undone by a series of long, languid stretches, a ruffle of his hands through his hair.

Nightlight snorts at him playfully, and Apollo laughs with something infectious in his smile. They eat together, still in the hold and both ignoring Orion occasionally pounding on the door with a heavy fist, Apollo nibbling on sharp cheeses and apples, leaning against Nightlight and humming as Nightlight scratches his scalp and strokes gentle fingers over the raised ridges on his back. The moment seems to be what Apollo needs – a long rest to heal the hurts of his body, a few moments of gentleness and care to soothe the hurts of his mind.

“I didn't know you could keep me asleep like that,” Apollo murmurs. His eyes are half-closed, the thin delicate skin of his eyelids tinted grey by the eyeball beneath, the translucent paleness of his skin open like a map of his veins, the shape of his muscles, this pale bare star-boy, ripped from the heavens too soon. His soft lips curl into a smile of pure innocence and joy, and he says, “I've not been so happy in years.”

Nightlight understands, with Apollo's eyes half-closed and the guardedness let down, why the people think the Lunanoffs are blessed creatures.

Nightlight pets his silky hair and encourages Apollo to his feet; he goes reluctantly, yawning and looping his arms over his head with easy assurance in his own body. It is a movement so very Apollo, so at ease in his skin, that all at once Nightlight feels reassured about the damage done to his Tsarevich. Apollo can heal. Nightlight will make sure of it.

But right now, it is time to meet Asterion, festering scars open and all. As much as Nightlight would wish to keep him safe from the pains and the hurts of the world forever, Apollo is a young man now, and he needs to be able to face them on his own. He needs to be able to stand before them one day and deny them presence in his court, his constellations, the least he can be expected to do is deny them within himself. It will not be easy to learn. It never is.

It makes it hurt no less when a single one of Orion's shrivelling glares makes Apollo hunch in on himself like an ugly thing. Apollo looks beautiful as ever in the courtly clothes Nightlight has brought him, flattering his body-type and accentuating his features, but with the confidence gone it looks awkward and strange. Orion's hand lands on Apollo's shoulder like it belongs there, and the tsarevich turns his head away so he does not have to see Nightlight's pity.

The walk to the Towers of the Moon is silent, the skimmer ride that has Apollo clenching his teeth and paling faintly. Everyone ignores Orion, who seems perfectly content to ignore them right back, save for his clawed grip on Apollo, which never once wavers.

The gleam of the Towers' polished stones rising smoothly into the air like an implacable god awes Apollo anew, and Nightlight smiles to see his eyes brighten with interest. He has hoped that the beautiful sight wouldn't be too marred when Apollo returns. The stain of his first visit is imprinted even now, though, in the way Apollo hesitates in the opulence, how he glances down the hall that leads to the throne room as if remembering Alysea's presence beside him. It takes only one look at Orion for what half-formed comment he has made to desert him.

Even better for Nightlight, Orion looks uncomfortable – a man bred for open woods, not cityscapes, and definitely not the arrogant opulences of the Towers of the Moon, a place that sings Apollo's power, his strength and his birthright. Nightlight supposes Orion does not like the reminder that Apollo is born to dominate _him,_ not the other way around.

Bowing and scraping servants that willingly prostrate themselves before Apollo usher them into a cool parlour decorated in faint, faded blues and pale sunshine yellows. Orion stands, incredibly out of place, but Apollo shrugs his hand away and sprawls familiarly over one of the divans, silvery eyes gleaming and catching the light like a lazy cat, a possessive magpie.

They are met by a familiar -looking man, distinctly harried and apologising frantically for the wait. Councilman Admetus falls to his knees when Apollo looks at him, and a welcoming smile lights up his face when the Tsarevich allows him to rise, his robes swishing around him. Admetus' open delight in having his prince returned counters Orion's standoffishness. His effusive greetings brings a warm, pleased smile to Apollo's face, self-assurance sinking back into him along with a little colour.

“We wait only upon the Lady Tsarina,” Admetus assures Apollo, after many inquiries on the Tsarevich's journey and comfort, “She wished to see you before I showed you to your suite.”

Apollo stands and strides to the councilman, placing his hands on the shorter Admetus' shoulders. He grins, fey and warm in the way only Apollo may be, and says, “It is of no import... it would please me to see mother again.” There is something reflective in his tone.

Admetus nods, and Apollo releases him, absently smoothing the line of Admetus' robes as he does so. With some amusement, Nightlight notices Orion silently fuming in the corner, a twitching muscle jumping in his jaw. Orion meets Nightlight's eyes, and glowers at him as if he wishes Nightlight to peel apart and wither under the force of it. Nightlight smiles at him instead, and offers him a glass of cool whisky and a little pastry.

Orion looks as if he might kill Nightlight, consequences be damned.

They pass the time chatting. Admetus is eager to fill Apollo in on the affairs of the court, and though surely Apollo does not recognise any of the names, he still listens politely, with something clear and bright in his eyes, and interjects with sardonic comments that make Admetus' eyes crinkle up at the corners. There is an instant trust and warmth between the tsarevich and the councilman, and Nightlight knows that this will serve Apollo well when he comes to take the throne. Already, there is one man he can rely on absolutely.

“In fact,” Admetus is saying, “I will be tutoring you in maths and politics – other such important subjects-”

“You got all the fun ones, did you?” Apollo interrupts dryly, and Nightlight giggles silently behind his hand at the faintly affronted look on Admetus' face. Apollo is an artist, not a mathematician, and he makes no attempt to look interested when Admetus launches into a speech about the importance of, as he calls them, “the logical arts”.

Thankfully, Admetus' long and tedious rant (even Orion is unwinding from his stiff, outraged state to one of deep boredom) is cut abruptly short by a rap on the door. Glad to take any distraction from his future-tutor, Apollo calls permission to enter.

A red-faced, panting messenger spills in, sucking the attention of the room with the gravity in his wild, panicked eyes. He is unable to speak, rubbery lips moving in an approximation of words.

“What is it, man?” Orion demands angrily, and the messenger shakes, taking such gasping breaths it sounds as if he has run three marathons.

He fumbles in his pouch, then staggers across the room, shoving it at Apollo without any of the customary regard for his station. Apollo, brow creasing in both confusion and something like annoyance at the disrespect, takes it curiously and unfolds it. For a moment, he is silent as he reads, then the colour drains from his face and he grabs for support. He rereads the note once more and then stares up at the messenger, looking horrorstruck.

“Is this true?” he whispers, and the messenger nods, looking miserable and struck-dumb.

Apollo's eyes widen and his face goes pasty white. He lets out some sort of low, pained groan, and the note floats from his nerveless hand. He stands there, shuddering.

Nightlight scoops it up, and feels his heart crash into his stomach. Wordlessly, he hands it to Admetus, who reads it out loud.

“ _The Tsarina is dead, due to a freak accident on the upper balconies. Her body is being prepared for cremation. The Tsar extends his greetings to his son and welcomes him back to the Towers.”_

The words fall like stones. Callous and uncaring, they make a mockery of emotion – Asterion's own emotional blindness. It is a cruelty that he could not have anticipated, and even Nightlight feels blindsided, broken and somehow struck by the news, as if he has just been punched. Irrationally, he thinks of Alysea's punishment, and wonders if it is by the same accident that Nevaeh has died, the temper of her husband.

Apollo's body folds. Surprisingly it is Orion who rushes forwards and catches him, supporting him gently to a chair. Crouching in front of the chair, Orion immobilises Apollo's wrists and talks to him in soft, urgent tones, eyes steely and concerned. He gives Apollo a brief little shake. “Pull yourself together, Face,” Orion says sharply.

Apollo's skin begins to radiate with a faint light, and his sightless eyes stare straight through Orion, isolated in his horror and numb shock. He trembles, something like sweat sheening his forehead. Orion slaps him across the face and the sound echoes in a _crack_ that makes Admetus wince. Apollo jerks and his eyes dazedly refocus on Orion.

“My mother is dead,” he says, looking lost, scared, _young._ Orion tightens his fingers around Apollo's wrists to the point that his knuckles go white. Apollo is still glowing. “I think my father killed her,” Apollo adds, very quietly, but they all hear him as clearly as if he had roared it.

“Oh my,” says Admetus faintly, and sits down.

All is silent, for a moment, then Apollo begins to laugh. It is no kind laughter, this is the broken, catching kind, the kind that claws at men who are too broken for tears, and Orion stares at the creature he has made out of a gentle boy who only wanted to heal as he laughs and laughs and laughs, laughs at the madness under his skin and in it, laughs at the madness that brightens and gilds him now, laughs at his father and his father's blindness. He laughs until smoke begins to pour out of his mouth in thick, pluming gouts, and his eyes light up with that brutal insanity that proceeds an eruption of his unstable magic. He shudders, then his whole body bursts into flames.

Orion shouts and jumps away, crashing onto the coffee table and breaking it in two with the weight of his body, rolls to his feet and steps back, something like horror, something like _fear_ on his face as fire flickers in Apollo's mouth, as fire shudders out of every heave of his laughing, maniacal body, shaking as if gripped by ague.

Apollo is laughing, still laughing, and there is fire swirling from his mouth and his hands, white fire that licks greedily at the rooms around them, ugly flames that have destroyed this place before, fire that twists in the shapes his body makes as that unholy laughter jerks him like a puppet.

“He-” Apollo is too breathless for words, but there is hell in his eyes, “He killed her, I know he did!”

Nightlight gulps, and Orion cringes in fear. Admetus watches in something like horrified amazement. None of them have the capacity enough to call for someone to dowse the flames. There is no stopping this inferno now.

Apollo laughs, and laughs, and then he cries like it is the greatest joke in the whole world, _“I'm going to fucking kill him too!”_

Around them, the inferno roars, and the Towers of the Moon burn.

 


	8. announce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings- oh god this is the closest to sexual nsfw i will go, non explicit sex, mentions of rape, mentions of all around debauchery, i feel like i need a three day shower and a deep cleanse, Apollo is growing up and you know what that means, it had to happen sometime, i'm quite literally gagging, body image issues

Apollo takes well enough to palace life. It takes only a few times of him getting lost in the labyrinthine Towers before he gives up and relies on Nightlight to escort him to the various rooms he uses for lessons. Nightlight takes precious care to bring him down the most deserted corridors, the ones with rich, faded wall-paintings with their original vivid scarlet and emeralds still visible even if their faces have faded, and dust-laden bars of sunlight streaming in through the windows that are thrown open only by a passing servant. These are the old walks of the Towers of the Moon, and their glass-tiled floors are bare and cold.

Nightlight watched these be built, and no one knows them better than he does, which is fortunate, as since the date of Apollo's formal recognising as Tsar Asterion's heir to the throne of the Constellations, the airy, pale corridors of the winding Towers of the Moon have been crammed full of courtiers desperate to catch a glimpse of the young prince.

The maids that service the tsarevich spread stories over the palace of Apollo's beauty, and the manservants wax poetic about his gentle manner and clever, assessing eyes (Lunanoff silver, of course, but only of the most refined and beautiful shade). Within weeks of his arrival at the Towers of the Moon, supposedly secret, every tabloid in the Constellations has published a thousand theories on his dress and his look, his manner of speech and his personality. The darker ones ruminate only on the unfortunate coincidence of Tsarina Nevaeh's death and her son's arrival at the Towers; hasn't Tsarevich Apollo been sent away for his lack of control before?

These dire accusations, however, are few and rare, they are drowned out by the slew of giggly, swooning magazines with half-blurry pictures snapped through windows.

The pressure of the life of a celebrity hiding from the public eye quickly wears on Apollo. He attends his lessons dutifully, scurrying back and forth between them whilst he is crammed into servants' passages and sometimes even has a hood pulled over his distinctive features. The few hours of free time he has he spends in the library, buried in dusty tomes and researching magic – always magic.

Tsar Asterion's spies watch over him constantly, without fear of reporting the slightest hint of deviance to his father. Several times Apollo, trailing his fingers over the spines of the weathered medical textbooks in the vast library, or daring to invite a maid or a manservant into his rooms, just to talk, to perhaps foster some sort of friendship in this foreign, unnatural place, is summoned to Asterion's private study, and returns late with frustration boiling thunderstorms in his steel-grey eyes and soft lips compressed thin with agitation. The maid or manservant disappears the next day.

Apollo says nothing, but Nightlight watches the fire rage under his skin, watches it snap and crackle and bite at the fragile ropes of Apollo's restraint.

On the way to Apollo's politics lessons with councilman Admetus, there hangs a great portrait, shrouded by a dust-sheet. The gilt edges of the portrait are soot-blackened, and the painting thrums even now with the old memory of the explosive fire magic that has once consumed the palatial gardens and nearby entrances. The first time they pass it, Apollo pauses, and asks quietly if he is responsible for the portrait's ruin. But why would a charred portrait still hang in the perfect Towers?

Nightlight hesitates to answer, then lets the portrait speak for him, and draws back the dust-sheet.

Eyes widening, Apollo stumbles back against the wall, then slides to the floor and stares. It is a portrait, one that matches the one childishly painted on Apollo's secret cage on Lyncis II. Nevaeh beams benevolently out of the portrait, with her hand resting lightly on her husband's arm, who peers sternly down at his son. There is a young Apollo, too, silver-cheeked and too pale, naked, clutching onto his mother's embroidered sleeve and staring out at the viewer with innocent query.

It is a snapshot of a happy time that never existed, and Apollo kneeling before it looks at the painted version of himself and whispers that maybe this is what it's supposed to be, if only Apollo's magic isn't so broken, if Apollo isn't the picture of everything his father prayed he'd never be-

Nightlight stops him then and embraces him until the ugly, shining tears stop.

The courtiers will say that Apollo is beautiful when he cries. Nightlight will only ever see a hurting boy who never left the cage.

Admittedly, Apollo does not take well to the maths, politics, strategy and sciences. He excels in literature and music, and when he plays the lyre or the pianoforte, the palace servants make excuses to stop and listen. But Apollo is an academic only when he wants to be, and however Admetus explains it, Apollo refuses to take any interest, completing his set work unimaginatively and with great boredom.

Tsar Asterion has his son sit in on council meetings, and Apollo sits there and eats grapes with his feet on the desk and Orion at his side, muscled arms crossed and glaring at any council-member who dares look too long at the tsarevich. Admetus mutters in despairing asides to Nightlight that Apollo’s heart is in the right place - but his head is somewhere else entirely! He fears the Constellations will fall to ruin under Apollo’s lackadaisical hand.

Yvanna, Apollo’s instructor in the arts, tells Admetus that he worries far too much, and turns shining eyes on Apollo. He smirks at Admetus, and Yvanna colours deeply.

Nightlight wonders if Apollo is realised that there are other girls than Alysea, yet. He makes no mention of her, but Nightlight is no fool, he sees the way Apollo’s head snaps up at any mention of moonmages, and the way he hoards bells and bits of ribbon in one of his jewellery boxes - bells and ribbons that Alysea might have liked to weave into her hair, once, when it was as long and luxurious as the sweep of night, not the withered, stringy grey it is now. Asterion forbids any conversation of her the same way he does his late wife - Apollo, at least, has a small marked monument to remember his mother, of Alysea, he has only the false comfort of ratty ribbons and rusty bells.

The preparations for the ball have left the Towers swarming. The smells of cooking food waft through the halls and rich bolts of fabric appear everywhere, creating new, shaded alcoves for the illicit trysts that will no doubt take place. The gardens are almost completely reinvented, twinkling lights hang from every tree and silken songbirds whisper in a susurrus of soft sensuality. The atmosphere is decidedly seductive in the gardens, and Nightlight wanders through them earlier that morning and wonders what sort of ball Asterion is proposing.

The celebration of a son’s entrance into manhood has always been an interesting one, Nightlight supposes, and leaves it at that.

He helps Apollo into his clothes, later that night, feeling him shake as Nightlight smooths the shirt over his chest and pulls his belt buckle tight. Apollo looks paler than ever, colourless in his anxiety, his hair is as white as snow and his cheeks are the colour of the freshly washed marble towers around them. Only his lips have the palest flush of rose - he has been biting and worrying them between his teeth all afternoon.

“I don't like this,” he whispers. He sucks in a deep breath and his pale, spindly hands move searchingly across the expensive, embroidered ruffles of the shirt. He swallows. “What… What if I hurt someone, Nini?”

Nightlight lifts the smoke-grey frock-coat over his shoulders and says nothing, choosing to pat Apollo’s shoulder comfortingly instead. There is nothing he can say that can alleviate these fears. They both know they are very valid, after all.

It is Apollo’s first, formally public presentation, and his entrance is massive. The grand doors swing open silently, and the milling crowds stop and stare. Brightly dressed in the glittering lights of the ballroom, they are a magnificent and terrifying sight, bodies beautiful and androgynous, robed in the most exquisite rainbows of cascading fabrics that make the splendour of the sight a feast for the eyes, and every powdered face is turned towards him. Smoke drifts in visible swirls, an avid display of greed awaits the indulgent at the groaning banqueting tables, the band with their gleaming orchestra pipe up marching tunes to celebrate their lord’s arrival.

Silence, save for the brassy screams of trumpets and fanfare, rules the ballroom, eyes expectantly judge as their prince shyly steps out of the shadow, the light gleaming and gilding his royal features to an ecstasy of shimmering whiteness.

The ballroom is located in the grandest section of the Towers, and is walled only on two sides, the other two are completely open to the gardens. Apollo stands at a dais facing the back wall, the breathless courtiers clustering around the smooth marble steps, draped with all manner of richly coloured rugs that make the eyes hurt to see, they are so bright, that lead down from the dais. His pale colours suit his paler face and skin, makes him a shining star rather than an anxious boy.

Tsar Asterion, eclipsed in this wondrousness, takes his son by the arm with cold glittering eyes, and a priestess nude but for the swirling yellow paint over her damp skin steps forward to stand present at the ceremony of his induction.

Everyone is silent out of respect as Apollo swears his oaths to the Light, but murmurs have already begun by the time they reach officiating his naming. It does not take long, but the courtiers are turning to enjoy the displays of luxurious indulgence left on display for them; giggling stars with spiked gags sinking poison into their tender cheeks are swept onto eager laps, their bountiful sands spilling as hands paw at their delicate, spun bodies; bellies gorge themselves on the rich food, stains smattering fine frocks and ruby mouths, vile and corpulent bodies gleam whitely in the crystalline lights like wet, repellent slugs dampened by wine so expensive it costs thirty lives for one bottle - now, poured laughingly over a fellow's lumpy, soft chest; a screaming serving-boy is wrestled to the ground and claimed by a stronger patron, then eight others, he is left there with blood staining the rugs and ripped clothes that flutter around him like moth wings, later someone will prod him with a spear and he'll dance for coins thrown at his feet and grabbing, hungry hands when he is too exhausted to take another step; impromptu wrestling matches that lead to sex break out with teasing touches and the snap of leather, the dominant taking advantage of the submissive and rapturous screams that echo off the brilliant extravagance of the walls; clothes are discarded haphazardly in little heaps, those dresses that have cost thousands torn off in an instant, now they mingle in a skin that is shared by everyone, slick with sweat.

Everywhere there is the rich, righteous pageantry of sweet sin, cannibalistic pigs scooping out bowls with their meaty fingers, greed and lust thick like a summer haze of heat, sweat beading on the serving-boy's back and tears on his cheeks, unseen, they will be quoted in a poem written by a great lady with her feet propped up on the broken spine of her serving girl, swollen with her master's pregnancy, and described like diamonds reflecting the purity of the Light suffusing the holy courts.

A brutal, hungry lot, decadent in their depravity and endlessly enchanting in their indulgence, how easy it would be to fall to their level, a life lived in the pursuit of beauty at the expense of mercy, of sensuality without modesty, of indulgence with restraint. Those three values are the lifeblood of the Constellations, and they beat in the breast of every human has a pounding heart to desire and dream.

At last, Apollo is abandoned into that ecstatic, writhing chaos, grasping limbs reaching out to caress and eager fingers twisting into the buttonholes of his coat, trying to coax it off, trying to invite him into their dance, _become one of us, one of us, leave your sweetness behind little boy and come play with knives that taste like blood and sweat-stained leather soaked through with the tears of the wasted animals we have unfurled to be,_ like a rosy flower opening to its first bloom, like a young girl barely reaching the age of womanhood pounced on by every available suitor there is to claim her.

 _Let us claim you,_ the wicked of the Constellations whisper, their palms slick with gold and grease made from the sweat of their underlings, their dizzy underlings enslaved by the sensual chains of violence and rapture. They offer to worship on their knees, for to touch the shining Lunanoffs in all of their insane, sweet, pained brightness is to kneel at the feet of the Light itself, to feel a sliding touch or hear a ragged gasp is to feel the Light soaking into one's soul - this act of holy divinity, a gift so base to humanity.

Nightlight is there, a black barbed shape oiled over in the gloss of the lights, the carapace of his flanged armour like the points of daggers, pressing red slits into the tumbling, uncontrolled bodies that get too close, a dagger at his hip, fire and Light in his eyes. It is all too easy to forget that Nightlight, as removed, as enduring in his innocence as he is, remains still a product of this dark time of pleasure, has grown with its scanty morals spoonfed with every waking moment. Loyalty to the Light, lust for his master's approval, the eternal slave gleeful in his chains.

He is there to make sure no one slips a dagger between Apollo's ribs, and guards the smooth skin of Apollo's hyaline arms from the bite of injections, sweet oblivion that promises a yawning path for a young man on the cusp of his first bloom. Apollo is no serving-boy, and he cannot be claimed, there is fire in his blood and smoke in his scent, but those who would circle him hungrily like wolves identifying the weak link. Oh, but they will make him offer his throat for the claiming, mark pure pale flesh flushed red all over with sin and lust. The guilt makes it sweeter - these criminals know nothing of guilt.

_One of us, one of us._

Conversations lilt in pace with the music; wildly erratic, the people of the Golden Age are as mercurial as they are winsome, and within moments what sensible conversation there is to be had by stern old rulers who are trying their best to appear dignified in front of the young Tsarevich is lost to whimpering admiration of his beauty. Apollo, smiling uneasily, will move on, catch the dark fire of Orion's eyes in the distance, always watching, always hunting.

"Such a sweet face," women whisper as he passes, "Such a beautiful face," their husbands agree, "So divine," here, they will shudder in erotic abandon. People draw back only from the worship of his presence at the counterpoint of Nightlight, sleek and deadly little boy trained to fight and far better at it than the gentle ashes wearing a divine face that he is sworn to protect.

The little boy that has been left behind in the cage will not survive long here. Slavering hunters have whetted themselves on his blood and tears once before, now like sharks they return to their meal, with clever fingers that slide up Apollo's thighs and coax his frock coat off his shoulders. He twists and struggles in their hold, panic and memory in his eyes - Apollo, for all the supposed virginal purity that is making him so enticing to the greedy courtiers, is no stranger to the dangers of a beautiful face.

He can escape for bare moments at best, ducking behind red drapes and watching the pack fall on some other unwary victim, gulping wine that a careful Nightlight has brought him until there is a pleasant buzz in his head, and his fire seems to rage through every vein, a thirst that urges to be satisfied.

Damnation comes in the form of a woman, sly-dressed and slip-skinned, black lips curling into a wicked little smile as she leaves the poisonous embrace of an old lover to sidle beside the Tsar, murmuring apologies as she refills her wine.

She holds the goblet in a familiar grip, has deepset eyes that glitter due to their depth, rawboned in a fascinating way that has her wrist joints bulging at the skin, the sweeps and scrapes of her cheekbones and jaw creating odd, dramatic shadows accented by the paint on her face and wrists, red like a claiming.

She sees him looking and giggles, flutelike trills, and murmurs that her name is Scorpio Illetta Romari, what a bad little thing he is, to sneak away from all of his desperate fans. Apollo laughs a little self-deprecatingly, and her eyes shimmer over with flattering interest. They talk for a while, the pads of her fingers skimming the line of Apollo's shoulders and his neck, interspersed with comments in that oddly soft voice of hers on Apollo's beauty.

"A pretty little thing like you can hardly have never been touched by a woman before," Illetta chides tenderly, when her exploratory touches make Apollo jump and squeak. A hectic flush of red appears on his cheekbones, and he splutters out some awkward reply, transfixed by the look in her eyes. Like a spider weaving an expert web, she reels him, trusses up her gleaming little fly and prepares to pick him apart.

Illetta, as she admits, white teeth gleaming insolently in a way that promises no remorse, enjoys the young men, not sure of themselves and desperately eager to please. "The passion is hard to recreate once confidence is gained," she informs him, her hand having undone his belt buckle some time ago and Apollo's own hands clutching hard onto the pillar behind him as he breathes hard.

Nightlight, watching, hardly gets a single look from his charge. Apollo is uncomfortable and uncertain, but the promise of what Illetta is offering is catching his interest just enough that he cannot bear to drag his eyes from her. There is something in the brilliance of his lunar-bright eyes that murmurs with the suggestive tones of desire - he does not know what he feels, but he feels it, and Illetta offers him that and more.

"I can teach you," she whispers into the shell of his ear, biting the lobe and smiling at his ragged noise, "I can teach you to make the world fall at your feet. Oh, you're beautiful, don't get me wrong, and you're powerful, _mm_ , everyone knows it. But have you ever wondered how far you could take yourself? Have you ever been _greedy,_ my tsarevich?"

Apollo swallows, Nightlight can see his throat bobbing. There has not been an opportunity for Apollo to explore greed and indulgence before, restriction after restriction placed on his growing world until now, when Apollo is first given a choice - be the perfect, respectable, gentle little prince his lessons asked him to be, or to follow the hunger for blood and lunar madness, the selfishness so long denied to a little boy who had thought that healing was his only lifeline, and denied even that.

"I stole textbooks," he confesses softly, "I... I destroyed my friend's life... I caused my mother to die... I disappointed my father, I still do-"

"Two seems a rather paltry number of hearts to break in your life," Illetta sighs, "If he is already disappointed in everything you are, why not push yourself further? Show me..."

Her hands are unbuttoning his shirt. Apollo, feeling her cool touch against his bare flesh, jerks back suddenly, the spell near-broken. "I-" he bites his lip, hard, and shame replaces excitement, the near realised dream of escaping his father's yoke.

Orion has done his work well. Apollo's face is beautiful and draws all that see him to their knees - but his body is a tapestry of abuse, silver scars marching over his spine like soldiers ready to die. Apollo, fledgling still to this world, hides in embarrassment from their unveiled, elegant bodies.   
Illetta tuts quietly, then turns on her heel and orders he follow her.

For a teetering moment, Apollo is wracked with indecision. He is out of his depth here, and frightened, it shows in the paleness of his face, in the way he pulls his shirt tight over his shirt, the way he glances to Nightlight for reassurance, his shoulders slumping and bowing to a submissive posture. But he is also enticed, and wary of disappointment – and certainly not on the day of his _first appearance in public._ He bites his lip as he stares at Illetta, thinks of the glow in her eyes, and Nightlight can see when he makes a decision.

His shoulders hang low, and he smooths trembling hands down his shirt. He follows Illetta, too frightened of disapproval after all these years of rigorous training, too entranced by the possibility of an airy freedom he can't bear to ignore even if he can't believe it, and not now, not when he's found something that make someone else's eyes light up brightly, when he's found something that offers him the precious prize of validation and security.

She leads him out to the gardens, where the night falls heavy between the tree trunks and the twinkling lights pinpoint the shadows like defiant stars. A slender gazebo, golden as the sun, waits, and Illetta draws him inside, wraps her arms around his neck and reaches up to kiss him gently. Nightlight hops onto the wall surrounding the gazebo, a watchful presence in the night, turning his attention back to scanning the partygoers streaming out of the open ballroom in search of a undisturbed place.

He can hear Illetta kissing Apollo, can hear her whisper gentle encouragements, and finally the thud of collapsing fabric. Nightlight has not seen Apollo naked since the night he rescued him from Orion's dominion on Rhea II, and he does not turn his head now, not even when Illetta tells Apollo that everyone he met would bear scars, some physically, some not, and that they are testaments to struggles survived.

They talk a while longer, interspersed with kisses, a few jokes, until Illetta jumps, the rapidity of her steps and breathing suddenly picking up. “What was _that?”_ she demands, still quiet-voiced, but harder than before, and Nightlight can all but hear Apollo shrink.

“I'm sorry,” Apollo gasps desperately, “I didn't mean – that's my magic, I-”

“By the Light, don't _apologise,_ ” Illetta rasps, “Is that some small, localised lightning?”

“Actually just sparks,” Apollo says, seeming a little pleased by her interest. “Ah... If I build them up, I can make a fire. But I used to use them to scan people a lot. Medically.”

There is a pause, and then Illetta asks in a sly tone, “Can you do that from anywhere on your body?”

Nightlight can definitely hear Apollo's innocent confusion now. “I suppose,” he answers warily, “I've never tried before apart from my hands...”

“Sweet suffering angels, your hands are all I need,” Illetta hisses, and Apollo makes a startled noise, then a hushed gasp.

“I don't want to hurt you!” he says, voice strained, a little while later, and Illetta chuckles throatily.

“Don't worry about _that,”_ she says, and Nightlight stops listening after that.

Night deepens into dawn, and the sun rises over the Celestial City, shimmers behind the green leaves and hovers over fallen dew. The ball is still in swing, but the music is distant enough that it seems another world, and a few exhausted lovers sleep curled up in each other's arms, drifting in dreams. Nightlight remains at his post, tireless eyes keeping watch, and thinks mournfully about a long dark hall of fire-blasted stone, and the eager little boy who had waited at the end.

The little boy has grown, now, become a young man with as much fire in his eyes as there ever was desperate sorrow. For the first time, he has slipped his father's control, submitted to a different authority and made his own choice. Nightlight, perched atop the low stone wall, cannot help but think that this is the beginning of the end.

Overhead, the rising sun crowns the Towers of the Moon like blazing fire.


	9. showcase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> corporal punishment, ie whipping, parental child abuse, swearing, murder attempts, scars, physical abuse

The weeks after Apollo’s presentation are hazy and dreamlike. The Tsarevich spends most of his time in someone else’s bed, subdued under fragrant curls of smoke with wine on his tongue and sparks of magic on his fingertips. Orion dogs him like a toothache, dragging him from whatever perfumed haunt he has found, sneering at the delicate make-up that flushes his cheeks and pinkens his soft lips, and brings him down to the training grounds to sweat. Even that it is a spectacle, and Apollo treats it like the show it is.

Tsar Asterion’s anger hardly seems to occur to Apollo, usually caught up in some far-distant world induced by the ritual smoke, a priestess on either arm and a stable boy at his feet. Whenever Nightlight sees him, Apollo is always drifting, pupils huge and dark, somewhere on the cusp of enlightenment. Tsar Asterion summons Nightlight and snarls towering rage he cannot express any longer; the next day Apollo’s favourite whores will be bruised and years older, but Apollo will blink slowly at them with the unaffected warmth of a sun-soaked tide, and whisper the secrets of magic into their skin.

Nightlight frets, and glares at Illetta Romari, who holds his leash with a smile and a pointed, poisonous word in his royal ear. She skews everything, molding the eager-to-please young Tsarevich into a toy of her making; by the light, he makes it easy for her. He repeats her political views like a broken track-recorder, earnestly devout like a boy at his first cleansing, when the priestess’ robe laps off her shoulder and the ritual smoke is weighting his limbs. 

Tsar Asterion finds it more disgraceful than ever. Illetta is no Alysea, that is clear, this smooth woman is more akin to a heated butter knife than the blunt, steadfast axe Alysea was. But the comparison may be made, and Asterion grips Orion by his jaw and slams his head into walls, sprays the hunter’s handsome face with spittle, hadn’t Asterion sent Apollo to Orion for the reason that he is too dependant on the opinion of women? 

Nightlight, caught between his loyalty for his Tsar and his love for his Tsarevich, may only look sidelong at Orion when he crumples brokenly to the floor, bruises around his throat and new crowsfeet around his dark eyes. Orion will say nothing, but the both of them feel this odd compatriotship, forged in the dangerous no-man’s-land fought between the Tsar and his son. Nightlight wonders who will survive this section of the little game.

Eventually, however, councilman Admetus proposes a solution to appease all of them. It is required that a future Tsar know his dominion, and what better way of exposing Apollo to his future peers than by sending him on a tour of the Constellations? Tsar Asterion agrees instantly, whether because he thinks it is a good idea, or simply because it removes the shame of his feminine, weak son from his eyes, Nightlight doesn’t question.

At first diffident, it takes only Illetta’s brief interest to make Apollo eager enough for the trip. He turns shining eyes on her, and confesses, words guilty and rushed, that he does not travel well, that it hurts, it burns, and Illetta smiles and tells him that she is sure he will manage. Nightlight, remembering Apollo’s haunted screams as they’d ripped him from the soil of Lyncis II, touches his arm gently, and is rewarded with a shaky smile.

On the way, some secret rendezvous is planned, and Orion is waiting at the door, dressed in spring greens, and Apollo takes his arm without a word. Nightlight, bemused, follows behind, peering suspiciously at them as Apollo plays his fingers up Orion’s arm as they walk; the huntsman shooting amused glances at the Tsarevich, his grip tightening a hint possessively. Nightlight would have interfered, except it obviously seems to be Apollo’s intention; the heated glance he shoots back at Nightlight and faint headshake make it clear that he is not to interfere.

The walk is long and winding, and Nightlight follows obediently behind, at a respectful enough distance to allow Apollo to whisper in Orion’s ear without fear of being overhead. Orion’s pleased rumbles lower in tone the longer this goes on, and his spine stiffens, his shoulders squaring in pride as Apollo, increasingly obviously, flutters on his arm in an ingratiating manner. Apollo is not practised at this, his flirts are more awkward than anything else, but the fact that he knows to resort to this to make Orion do what he wants sickens Nightlight. 

“‘Spose I do, Face,” Orion’s voice is suddenly loud enough for Nightlight’s straining ears to catch. “What’d I get out of it?” He stops and catches Apollo’s chin roughly in his harsh grasp, and Nightlight clenches his fists and watches Apollo’s false bravado shrink, his shoulders bowing in and his spine sloping, like a frightened child knowing he will get hurt.

Apollo’s response is inaudible, but it clearly shocks Orion, for he blinks and drops Apollo’s chin, stepping back like he doesn’t quite know how to handle the situation. For a moment, they stare at each other, then Orion falls to one knee and murmurs, “My lord, a pact is a pact.”

With a triumphant grin that seems to beckon madness, Apollo motions for him to rise, then strides off, something like cockiness in his stride and manner. 

He does not deign to touch Orion again.

It plays out exactly like Nightlight remembers, and Apollo’s sobs for mercy are still as penetrating as ever, following Nightlight wherever he goes on the luxurious cruise ship, even crammed deep into the bulkheads, all Nightlight can feel is Apollo, Apollo’s pain, Apollo’s madness. Apollo’s fire jumbles in his bones and in the hollow spaces in his veins where blood is supposed to flow into the heart of a boy frozen in time. Nightlight grips his lunar-bright hair in his own hands and hunches over to hide from their madness, the first and the last, screaming together in unison.

Illetta spends a lot of time down in the hold where Apollo is strung up in poisonous chains of iron, just watching. She sips a glass of red wine and writes letters as his screams echo in symphony, letters addressed to a redder and more venomous woman, her dear friend and at one point, close student, the Lady Archaline, known as the ‘viper’ in impolite circles, for her habit of kissing and killing. Rumour has it that not one man has survived longer than three months after a single night with her, and yet, they come to her like flies begging to be woven into a spider’s web. Illetta pens sharply cursive words like  _ ‘malleable’, ‘weak’, ‘easily-led’  _ and smiles softly as Apollo begs her to make it end.

Nightlight, spying on her mail, shudders when he sees the addressee, drops it quickly back into the pile, and goes to wash his hands of any lingering poison. 

Orion wanders like a rudderless ghost around the halls, his handsome face marked with exhaustion. He cannot sleep, he mutters to Nightlight, his dark eyes fretful, not with Apollo’s screams in his mind. Orion grabs his reddish hair through his hands and pulls hard, yanking out chunks at once. His bow, ever-present, seems to slump with his spine. He can’t sleep, he repeats, not in this metal box, not a forest in sight. 

Nightlight stares at him and finds himself in the uncomfortable position of feeling pity for a man he knows full well has taken as much relish in his Tsarevich’s suffering as Illetta is. Nonetheless, sometimes Orion joins him in the bulkhead, hips crammed up against one another in the tight space, and he will talk, and talk, and talk, words spilling out of him like a festering wound, sometimes things that make sense, sometimes rambling labyrinthine paths to nowhere, mentioning things like  _ ‘Face’, ‘for his own good’, ‘am I supposed to bloody regret it? -him?’, ‘I thought… I don’t know what was fucking real and what was my own damn hopes’.  _ Nightlight doesn’t like hearing it, but he has never been in the business of interrupting, so he sits and listens. Sometimes he learns things that leave him unable to meet Apollo’s maddened silvery eyes without breaking into tears, and that cannot be done with Illetta waiting, poised like a snake ready to strike.

They arrive in Cancer first, stopping in every major city. Then it’s on to Taurus, Aquarius, Pisces, Sagittarius. Wherever they go, the story is the same. They dock, and wait until Apollo’s shuddering tears have stopped. Illetta will shake her head with faint disappointment, and he will fall eagerly at her feet, a desperate puppet ready to make up for the sins of his incapacity. Whichever rich lord or lady it is will greet them, eyes skimming admiringly over Apollo’s body in the tight leggings and high boots he wears, the loose ruffled shirt made to be discarded. No doubt, later, they will remove the garments themselves, or the servants. Passion explodes in his wake like the rush of fire, the best musicians are brought out to dance and play until three nights after dawn, when they collapse from exhaustion, their limp bodies will dragged into the centre for entertainment for the masses. Dead bodies will be kicked to the side, their stink disregarded by the heaviness of perfume and sweat, screaming ecstatic bodies moving in the dim light.

Worship wells up as he goes. Virgins rush in front of his path and prostrate themselves before him, young boys tossing flowers and girls kissing his polished boots, mothers grasp statuettes with his noble features, fathers erect temples in his name. Vivid artwork of the most decadent scenes decorate these celebrations of hideous sin, the worst depravities the Golden Age can think to heap on the shoulders of a young boy made their puppet-prince, naked and dancing for the coins of their approval. 

How sweetly he writhes under the lick of the whip! How strongly he moves when he pins his latest willing supplicant! How gracious he is in his divinity! And oh, how blessed, with his fire and shine!

Orion and Nightlight are working together over the clock now, to stop someone’s teasing knife-play from becoming a murder attempt. Feverish worship and glee follows him like a hornet’s nest, but wherever there is one that inflames the heart of his people, there will be those who hate the heat. 

It is sometime in Virgo when their skills are put to the absolute test - Apollo, distracted by his uncle, Lord Lunar Cepheus Lunanoff-Chonderlee, and his wife, the Lady Virgo Amalthea Chonderlee, nearly is riddled through with a quiver of arrows. Later that evening, he is almost poisoned; instead, Orion is carted off with a greenish face. Then he slips on an icy footbridge and nearly plunges onto a conveniently placed spike. Lady Amalthea titters and brushes the attempts off, her hand lapping over his arm delicately, pointing out her daughter as they pass, shy thing, pale thing, deathly thing, quivering with the madness hidden in Apollo’s own skin. 

“Could she be any more fucking obvious about trying to knock him off?” Orion hisses as the healers work on him to Nightlight, who chuckles and agrees. Apollo, bewitched by Amalthea’s compliments, is completely ignorant of any deceit.

The attempts do not even let up during the festivities, and Nightlight, distracted by the bustling people, without Orion’s aid, nearly allows Apollo to be kidnapped before he realises what is going on. The Tsarevich, drunk and probably intoxicated by darker substances, is pulled into a dark alley, groping hands enough of a distraction for a more nefarious intention. Nightlight does not even realise until he hears the chime of bells and a grown man’s scream. 

Upon running to the scene of the crime, he sees a hunchbacked old crone with a hood over her face and tatty ribbons in her greyish hair helping Apollo to his feet. Nightlight freezes, glow waning, and the crone’s eyes gleam moonmage silver with tears as Apollo thanks her, bewildered, ignorant, pushed more than willingly back to the throng of the party.

The crone touches Nightlight’s hand with one withered claw, and whispers,  _ “Keep him  _ safe,  _ knight.” _

Nightlight will grasp her elbows before she can disappear, and two young girls will run, shaking, into the alley, with pale face and muddy eyes streaked with tears. “Please!” the paler wails, “Someone just stabbed my papa!”

They return to find Cepheus dead and Amalthea kissing Apollo over his corpse, pushing him back against the fountain and lifting the shirt from his scarred back to smear his kin’s blood over his white chest. The young Selena clutches hard onto the crone’s hand and shakes against her ragged skirt, her skin is glowing, there are oceans in the depth of her stormy eyes.

They move on quickly from Virgo after that.

In Scorpius, Illetta brings out her home-element. Here, the vipers glide in the lazy sunshine, and fire shimmers in the light of the four suns. A desert world, a dusty world, and girls wear rags and boys wear nothing, naked bodies bronzed with sweat and heat. They meet the Viper there, a coiled length of leather between her clever dark hands and brilliant red lipstick, a cool little smile. Illetta will see Apollo looking as the Lady Archaline stalks the ball for the powerful and influential, and quickly turn his face away. 

“That’s Archaline,” she will murmur, in an aside too intimate for him to query her identity, “She’s  _ not  _ a beginner pony, love. Stay away from her.” Illetta shudders warmly with memory. “Come back when the future of your line is secured and you feel like losing everything to a woman.” She sighs, and blows Archaline a kiss.

“What do you mean?” Apollo asks, just as some bold man thinks to steal a kiss from Archaline, and grabs her around the waist. In a moment, a dagger sprouts from his chest, and Archaline reaches down and takes his coinpurse. She hands it to her companion, a star gleaming bitter orange, who looks up suddenly and meets Apollo’s eyes.

Chills race down Apollo’s spine, and as the party continues on unawares of their dead guest, the viper slips away smiling, a servant-girl following her loyally and her dagger slipped up her sleeve.

Eventually, the tour ends and they return to their comfortable quarters in the Towers of the Moon. Illetta has taken her leave of Apollo sometime around the later ends of the journey, her canny preservation instinct recognising something that Nightlight is blind to, that Orion already knows. She promises to visit, later, and Apollo will laugh and kiss her with his painted lips, and smile as the Celestial City erupts into rapture at having him return.

In the space of his absence, he has become a god. The people love him, many are already whispering that Tsar Asterion has outlived his time. The council looks at him with an assessing eye, wondering  _ ‘is he ready?’.  _

Tsar Asterion is still arrogant in his righteousness. He sneers and strides and stalks the halls of the Towers of the Moon, inflaming Apollo’s supporters. Publically, he mocks his son, and does not listen to the lack of ringing laughter that accompanied it before. 

Darkest of all, sometimes he summons Apollo to his chambers and Apollo does not leave until morning - when he does, he is crawling, and his shirt is red when it was white before. Sometimes he will go to Nightlight’s room, creep shivering onto his lap with black warped skin from lead poisoning, a spiked gag still wrapped around his soft lips, pleading eyes brimming and overflowing with tears. Tsar Asterion outfits his son like a star-slave  _ “you wanna be a whore? You wear their clothes!”  _  and kicks him down the stairs - Nightlight brings him back and bandages his whip lashes, Orion’s quiet advice in his ear a memory from when he sees the familiar way Apollo moves. 

_ “So what?”  _ Orion sneers at Nightlight,  _ “I know what Face fucking looks like when he’s been tortured, glowworm, I know how to cover up the fucking scars. You can have my help or not.” _

Nightlight wonders if it his duty to warn Tsar Asterion that a storm is coming, a storm of fire and fury, one brewing since a little two year old boy was sent away for a crime out of his control.

Then he looks at the way Apollo cries in his lap like a child, the way he whispers that he’s always been too  _ soft,  _ too  _ weak,  _ not  _ enough,  _ and swallows, and pretends he can’t smell the smoke of the enroaching fire.


	10. rise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings, body image issues, scarring, swearing, trauma, medical

Nightlight is looking for Apollo, half-running, half-bouncing down the hallways. He is playing a game of avoiding the blistering streaks of light from the windows that stripe the marble in glaring white streaks. He ducks, shimmies and bounds to stay in the shade, giggling whenever the warmth of the sun accidentally catches his dark armour.

It is a typical day in the Celestial City; the drone of busy skimmers are like bees working in a hive, darting from place to place, the lower rumble of ships coming in to the heaving docks and gaping wharves like wasps or hornets. In the thoroughfares of the city, the streets will be heaving with brightly-dressed people, trading and socialising, and the warm smells of cooking food waft in from the palace kitchens. They are preparing a feast for tonight, Nightlight has already seen them rolling in the great caskets of wine.

It is unremarkable in every way in its start, but by its end, this day will mark the turning point of a new age.

Nightlight sidesteps another beam of light and crashes full on into a sturdy chest, instantly rebounding and falling straight on the floor with a miserable sounding clatter of armour. A little dazed, the spectral knight blinks, outlined in the sunlight like a silvery ghost garbed in black spikes and faintly glowing nodes. Despite his surprise, Nightlight still shakes his head and grins up at Orion, who is rubbing his chest with a displeased look.

“You're the fucking boniest piece of shit I've ever seen,” Orion grumbles, and Nightlight's smile turns a little self-deprecating. He knows.

All at once, Nightlight brightens and jumps to his feet, slightly above the ground. Orion regards his antics with a wary eye, and Nightlight notices his hand twitch to his belt, as if he longs for the security of a sword at his side. But for once, Orion is dressed in court finery, any weapons he might be wearing concealed underneath rich fabric. Hopefully Orion will be able to tell Nightlight where his Tsarevich is?

“No fucking idea,” says Orion, at first. He pauses. “Say, what day is it, glowworm?”

Nightlight blinks, and then offers Orion his wrist, where some time ago an exasperated Nevaeh had strapped a communit so that they could keep in touch when Nightlight went to visit her son, but Nightlight has never really bothered to learn how to use it. The numbers make his brain hurt.

Huffing, Orion snatches his wrist and the communit's display lights up. Nightlight peers at it curiously as Orion manipulates it with ease to show the time and date. As soon as he does, his face falls, slightly, and guardedness carves grooves in his features. His dark eyes seem to shutter, and Nightlight does not like the look on his face then, dark and cold and frightening.

“I think I do know where he is, glowworm,” he says, slowly. “I think he went down to the training fields, today. He told me to tell you that.”

Slightly put off, Nightlight sinks back to the ground and lands with the click of armoured boots on stone. He nods gratefully to Orion, who only folds his arms across his chest and towers, imposingly.

“Don't you have some place to be?” Orion barks, and Nightlight jumps a little at the command in his tone, his brows pulling down into a scowl. Sometimes Orion is nice, other times, it feels as if he has forgotten how to be nice at all. Nightlight can never tell when his mood will switch, and sometimes it is a little unnerving.

Nonetheless, Nightlight has no reason to be rude, so he just squints a little at Orion and then bounds off, heading straight for the training fields. They are quite far from the Towers, down in the Apalfe Green, right next to the military barracks. The garrisons all train together, including any citizen who wishes to improve their swordwork. Nightlight wonders absently why Apollo would be there, and without Orion. Apollo never seems to like weapons-training, and hardly ever goes even when forced.

But Nightlight trusts Orion. What reason would Orion have to lie to Nightlight on this day?

The training fields are busy, people are taking advantage of the warmer summer weather. Tanned, muscled bodies ripple as weapons clash and clatter off one another in a savage cacophony, the snarls of soldiers too lost in the battle to think of anything else barely drowned out. At the far end, there are splashes of destructive magic and the powerful drumbeat of moonmages exercising their liquid powers, feverish in its intensity. The people of the Constellations fight like they fuck, rough, powerful and without remorse.

Nightlight hops up on a fencepost, kindly waving away the eager throng that wishes to test themselves against the Lunanoffs' personal guard, and scans the heaving mass for the scintillating white of Apollo lost in battle. He cannot spot him anywhere. Nightlight frowns.

Normally, wherever Apollo goes, he is accompanied by a gang of giggling girls and women, blushing courtiers that swoon whenever he so much as looks at them and who drape themselves over him as soon as he sits down somewhere. The stench of conflicting, flowery perfumes dogs him like a curse, and his pale skin has a tendency to reflect the sunlight, making him a glowing beacon of strangeness amid the ordinary humans. Nightlight cannot imagine that his admirers would desert Apollo if there is a chance of seeing him sweating and exhausted.

He comes to the conclusion that Apolllo is not at the training grounds. But in that case – where is he?

Nightlight is not clever, but he isn't brainless. He worries his lip between his teeth and frowns, suspicion and fear beginning to twist in his heart. Apollo has been unusually grim and silent for the past few weeks, breaking off to spend hours in secret talks with Orion, refusing to tell Nightlight anything. Nightlight thought maybe that perhaps Apollo is just growing into a stage where he feels like he needs no one, because the Tsarevich hounds his father, nearly always at Tsar Asterion's side. The Tsar has always looked pleased, but moreso aggravated, by his son's sudden dedication to learning how to rule the realm.

 Now, Nightlight begins to wonder. Has Apollo been planning something... something that he dares not even tell Nightlight? But why? Does he not trust Nightlight? What could be so dangerous that he cannot even rely on the protection of his own -

Nightlight's thoughts are abruptly derailed by a scream. He startles and nearly falls off the fencepost, blinking in confusion as the tides of people suddenly stop and begin staring in horror at something behind Nightlight. Great shouts of anguish go up, and in an instant, the world devolves into panic and chaos.

“FIRE!” A woman screams, and Nightlight feels his heart drop into his stomach with the cold claw of dread.

He turns.

The Towers of the Moon are on fire once more. Wraithlike flames take hold of the milky towers stabbing towards the sky, transforming them from beacons of royal virtue and power to savagery and destruction. The rippling pennants depicting the Lunanoff jagged moon are snapped up by the crackling flames, and soot blackens the walls in strange, esoteric patterns. The inhabitants jerk from their beds, awoken by the scent of the flames and the screaming of the unlucky trapped within. An exodus begins – clogging the passageways of the gardens that wind around the towers safely to ground level, jumping out of windows with only silk sheets to cushion the landing. Courtiers, once so eagerly flocking to the palace, now charge screaming out of it, wigs aflame and perfumes igniting like bombs.

Thousands will die today.

Nightlight needs no other prompting; he runs.

It is Apollo's fire, familiar to him as his own blood, and Nightlight runs swifter than any mortal human could achieve (he, like all the Lunanoffs, has always been something a little _more_ than human) and raises his voice in a great, silent shout that rings in the ear of every star-servant in the palace, alerting them to the catastrophe, telling them to take those who are kind to them and bring them to safety (the rest, Nightlight wonders, will probably be left to burn if they cannot find their own ways out). Skidding down marble hallways, he closes his eyes and focuses on Apollo.

No one of Lunanoff blood can ever hide from Nightlight for long.

He doesn’t know where his lance is and doesn’t bother to check. Not here, not now, with white rage painting the walls and tearing down everything great in these blood-soaked towers. The opulent decorations are melting directly off the walls, molten gold running rivers of rich supple yellow in the cracks in the heat-withered marble, rugs and carpets go up in smoke with the last wisps of expensive perfumes from the courtiers that have spent nights there – the throne room is a crescendo of flames, and Nightlight ducks past and feels a searing wind race past his cheek. His singed hair snaps back with brightness, and his armour is a torture, the thick plates are super-heated against Nightlight’s flesh, charring scars not long healed from Apollo’s first accident as a child.

The irony of history repeating itself occurs to Nightlight, and he can only pray that it ends with all of them alive the way it did before.

He skips the winding steps and bounds straight over them, relying on his slightly loose affair with gravity to see him to the top. Up here, the flames are ravaging, and Nightlight has to close his eyes and shield his face as he runs directly through great walls of fire, burning even the enchanted marble, the crackle of releasing ward-magic releasing violent explosions that rock the Towers. Soon, the whole structure will be in danger of falling down.

He bursts into Tsar Asterion's private study, the blasted door crumbling into soot at his touch. An angel stands there, wreathed in light and avenging fire, an angel with a charred and broken supplicant at its heavenly, glowing feet. Apollo's fire has burnt the clothes and flesh from his body, leaving him a ragged, ugly skeleton of withered, sooty meat, raw and red and raised, his boiling white eyes shining out of his face like a creature possessed, a demon gripped in the unholiest of darknesses, and in his crumbling hand there is the fire-snapped remnant of a bow, and at his feet there is the oily, stained corpse of his father, the stench of charred flesh heavy and nauseating in the air, sick and vomit and fear, and the body is unrecognisable – lumpy, twisted, shrunken oddly and inhuman in its final moments, as inhuman and monstrous as the man himself has ever been.

Apollo looks at him, raw and scarred and flayed bare, consumed within his own fires. He is screaming, Nightlight thinks, his body reacting instinctively to the terrible agony of being burnt alive, twisting like a puppet held by a remorseless puppeteer. His eyes are shining that hideous, mad white, like beacons out of his wrecked face, and it holds him there as his own powers consume him.

For so long Nightlight's job has been a protector of these broken, beautiful people, Lunanoffs that are as much human as a star, his kindred and beloved descendants, but so few realise that his job is mainly to do with protecting them from themselves, from the ugly, mad creature that lives within every Lunanoff heart and wants only that the world feel its pain, its madness, its anger. And now it is taking Apollo, and _Nightlight will not let it._

The wall crumbles like so much damp paper before Nightlight's will, and the wind screams past them as they fall, Apollo's scorched and broken body held like a limp, ugly ragdoll in his thin arms. They are trailing fire, like a streaking comet, and Nightlight can feel his own flesh beginning to burn and boil the longer he holds onto Apollo.

Apollo has always had the heart of a sun inside him, and now he is going into supernova.

The people far beneath, sobbing and wretched, are clustering in the courtyards, like ants to their distance as they plummet ever closer. Apollo is still screeching, some broken noise of animal torment, but the sound is ripped away by the wind, torn to shreds and blasted cruelly across the sky for any mind to hear. The air rakes claws over their bodies, and Nightlight's face is splattered with loose skin and blood from the near-corpse prince he holds in his arms, a faint ruby-white spray that sizzles in the fiery trails they leave behind. Nightlight's eyes are watering, from the speed, from the pain of being slowly cooked alive inside his own armour, the sluggish once-human blood beginning to boil in his veins, the frantic heart jumping and squirming in his glowing chest.

It takes more than a little heat to kill Nightlight, but that doesn't mean it won't _hurt._

The landing is a black-out. In a split-second they are falling, and then, suddenly, they are not. There is a horrendous crack, and Nightlight is sprawled out on his back, with Apollo limp over his skinny chest. Nightlight cannot breathe. His head is vague, assorted blurred images and broken memories. His chestplate is split in two, and the armour falls off him like shedded shells when he slowly sits up. There is silver-pink blood in his hair. Maybe he split his skull open? He prods it cautiously. Still whole.

The sun is hot, the fire from the Towers superheats the air, charging with crackling magic. Nightlight's swimming vision sees the blur of a creamy-warm star – _Saiph –_ bursting out of a window, the spinning trails of her cream sands twirling as she adjusts her shape into a large bird, winged, that sweeps slowly down and places her precious cargo on the marble courtyard. Councilman Admetus is revealed as the sandy wings peel back, pressing a thankful kiss to the star's demurely lowered head and tossing aside the empty collar Saiph wore to prevent her shapeshifting. Around them, burning courtiers throng, screaming and tearing about for the nearest fountains. The star-servants of the palace make their way serenely out, unbothered by the heat, though a few are unhappily snapping off sections of glass from their hardened bodies.

Apollo rasps, and Nightlight's attention is diverted. He sits up, the world whirling dizzily around him, and reaches for Apollo. The boy's body weeps silver, the essence of his magic bleeding out with his red blood as he nears death. His eyes are fixed, staring, on the sky, and his chest jerks in shallow, painful breaths. He looks barely human, disfigured and distorted by the hungry flames, his flesh warped and shiny where it has not been burnt off, ragged patches of soot-stained bone visible through the tears in his flesh.

Never has there been a creature more ugly or demonic to Nightlight's eyes, and he cannot help himself recoiling in disgust as he lifts Apollo's destroyed face into his lap, bending over him so that Nightlight's body blocks out the fires consuming the Towers.

Nightlight looks around, at the pageant of wilful destruction and terrible tragedy, and holds its cause in his arms, for this, he is uncertain whether Apollo will even survive. He is losing so much of his magic – it is deserting him, sensing that its host is dying, and his body is so broken – even if he does survive, Nightlight doesn't know if he would want to.

Apollo's breath rattles in his smoke-stained lungs, and his eyes flicker dimly with some verge of thought, dully, his cracked and shattered lips form the whispers of words, this foul creature that has torn down all of the Tsarevich's beauty in its anger. His eyes, no longer dyed pale by his magic, are deep and soulful brown, like the warmth of freshly turned earth under the sun. What remains of his wispy black hair is dark and deep, like tidal pools, and his blistered and broken skin is too red and charred to remain pale.

He coughs something inaudible, some vagrant string of hastily joined words. His deep brown eyes search Nightlight desperately for the answer – a god dethroned, stripped of his divinity, left cruelly bare and human in his weakness. “Did -” He coughs and Nightlight sees tears in his eyes. He shakily clutches the front of the tunic Nightlight is wearing under the shattered carapace of his armour, and his first question is not 'will I live?', but “Did he die?”

Nightlight's tears slip, pale and shining with light, onto Apollo's ruined cheeks, and he nods, silent sobs catching in his chest. Apollo smiles, a ghastly thing with his wrecked lips, and his eyes close softly as he passes out in Nightlight's arms, too exhausted from his expenditure to keep awake. Nightlight clutches him close and keens.

Apollo is free of his father, the Constellations are free of a tyrant, but in the process, has Apollo destroyed himself?

* * *

It takes months to make Apollo look human again.

The best healers from all over the Constellations come immediately to pledge themselves, but more than half turn away in horrified nausea when they see the wreck of their once gloriously beautiful Tsarevich. The shattered remains of the Towers remain an ugly blot in the centre of the Celestial City, the reconstruction work as slow and painstaking as the work on Apollo's ravaged body, a painful reminder of all that has been lost, and can never be regained.

The Council have taken over the running of the Constellations until such a time that Apollo is hale enough to assume his father's duties as the Tsar Lawful, and to find a partner to fulfil the other half of the role, the Blessed. Nonetheless, the Constellations suffer without their figureheads, and petty squabbles break out between long-standing allies, worsened by the aggravations of the ever-bolder Dream Pirates scrounging on the borders.

Councilman Admetus has already been down to the hospital, graveness in his eyes, and quietly presented Nightlight with a holodisc. When Nightlight activates it, he sees another pale, bleached Lunanoff face, this time a young girl, a Virgo girl by the name of Virgo Selena Chonderlee, the last prominent Lunanoff, Apollo's cousin. Perhaps, suggests Admetus in careful, gentle tones, Nightlight might go to guard her to take over the throne as the Lawful, so that the Constellations may have a ruler again.

Insulted, Nightlight points at the door behind which Apollo lies – traditionally, the elder Lunanoff has _always_ taken over the role of Lawful, the law-maker and financial ruler,  and the younger the Blessed, the religious leader and voice of the people, each as equally important as the other and the founding pair behind Constellar society. Nightlight does not care for the implication that Apollo might never recover to a standard the Court deems acceptable.

After all, who could bear having a Tsar with a face so broken and ugly that it makes all who look upon it both shudder with revulsion and fear?

Nightlight guards the door to his sickbed, held upright by his lance as tiredness bows his spine. He allows no one in save the healers, knowing that Apollo would hate to have the hideous remnants of him paraded on display like a circus freak.

Eventually, however, Apollo wakes up. At first, it's for fleeting moments, stirrings of consciousness that quickly sink back into sleep under the attentions of the assisting stars. Then it's for longer times, hours, then days. The first time they show him what he looks like now, he breaks the mirror and cries.

Nightlight repeats the words of the doctor to him every time he sees Apollo running his fingertips over his scarred and wasted skin. _The healers have done a good job. You'll likely make a full recovery._

Nightmares grip him, hold Apollo shaking in the middle of the night with sweat stinging his wounds and the memory of his own fire in his eyes. Nightlight crawls into bed with him then, pillowing Apollo's head on the hard shell of Nightlight's repaired armour, placing a reassuring hand on the lumpy, warped skin on the back of Apollo's head, tufts of ragged, wispy hair tickling his fingers.

Every day, Apollo's skin pales. He feeds like a leech from the energy of the star servants around them, his magic unhappily rooting itself once more inside him. Nightlight feels a great weight he didn't realise he was carrying lift from his shoulders when he sees Apollo's eyes flash the hard, cold silver he is used to once more. He makes no attempt to heal himself, shies from using his magic at all. Nightlight wonders if he will ever be so quick to use fire again.

Apollo asks for a mask. He seems happier with his disfigurement carefully hidden, adopts a new fashion of loose, baggy clothing that hides his wrecked and wasted body. The Council visit, crowding awkwardly around his bedside, and Apollo sits up straight with his mask positioned carefully over his face and confidently lies to them about his recovery rate (if he doesn't, Nightlight wonders if they will try to kill him). Physical therapy is slow and painful, he has just mastered walking again, but the doctors fret over him ever gaining full mobility of his right arm again.

The first person Apollo asks to see is Orion. Nightlight, a little dubious, asks him if he is sure, but Apollo nods with steel in his eyes. “I owe him for helping me,” he says, firmly, avoiding Nightlight's look a little guiltily.

Nightlight remembers. Orion lying to him in the corridors, buying Apollo enough time away from his protector to set the fires that have consumed both him and the Towers of the Moon. Nightlight is quick to say he forgives Apollo, knowing that he is hating himself enough as it is. He does not tell Apollo that he cannot help but mourn Asterion, for while knowing all of the horrible things he has done, the Purges that have killed thousands of magic-less civilians, for one, Nightlight was still there when Asterion was only a baby, raising him, loving him, the same way he is charged to raise, adore and protect every Lunanoff child.

It is against his blood to hate them.

Orion comes, hesitating briefly at the door. He is wearing his fine clothes again, Nightlight notes, but with a bow held loosely in his hand and a quiver over his shoulder. He looks first at the room, examining it in that careful way he has, checking for exits and for ambushes, the way all good hunters do. Then he looks at Apollo, and swears, softly.

Apollo is wearing his mask, his fingers twisting nervously in the bedsheets. The white light from the windows catches on the edges of the mask, gilds it silver as it does his eyes. At once, Apollo is transported into that shy, eager creature, desperate for Orion's attention and praise. “Stars shine upon you,” he whispers in his strained voice, trying his best to appear normal.

Orion shakes his head. “Take it off,” he says, and Apollo blinks rapidly behind the mask.

His shaking fingers carefully reach up and pull it off, and Orion jerks back in disgust and swears again. Apollo swallows and stares at the mask held in his hands. He bites his lips and repeats Nightlight's words like a mantra, the healers have done a good job already, he expects to make a full recovery.

Dismissively, Orion stares at him, something pitying in his eyes. “They can cover you in as much plastic as you like,” he says, “but you'll still be the same ugly monster beneath.”

He tosses the bow and arrows onto the bed, disregarding Apollo's flinch. Then he turns, smartly, the lingering snap of the military in his heel, and walks away, the door banging shut after him.

For a moment, Apollo is still. Then he reaches down, and lightly takes hold of the bow, running his finger along the smooth, polished wood. A determined spark lights in his eye, and at once, he surges upright, yanking in frustration at covers and blankets. He stumbles onto the floor, Nightlight rushing worriedly to support him. Apollo brushes him aside with a snarl of aggravated pride.

Gripping the bow, Apollo limps out into the hallway, leaning heavily against the walls. “Orion!” he shouts, as loud as he can, once he is out there. Orion half-turns, looking back at him.

Shakily, Apollo raises the bow. He is wincing with pain as his trembling fingers struggle to knock an arrow, attempting to aim at Orion. Suddenly, the bow falls from his nerveless grip. Shuddering and pale-faced with pain, the crippled Apollo laboriously bends to pick it up again. Orion begins to laugh and it is cruel laughter, cold and vindictive, mocking. Apollo's cheeks flush in shame, then abruptly he ignites with fury. Madness bleaches his mind and in a moment he is sprinting down the corridor, his hideous face twisted into a rictus snarl of bitter fury and pain.

 _“You think I need a weapon to hurt you?!”  
_ Startled, Orion falls easily when Apollo crashes into him, and white fire explodes around Apollo's clenched fists. He is raining punches down on Orion, who is pinned underneath him and flailing helplessly, an ungodly scream echoing around the halls as Apollo starts laughing now, mad, ugly laughter, giggling and shrieking with sadistic amusement, destroying Orion's face as his own is destroyed.

“Am I beautiful now, Orion?” Apollo is screaming, his flaming fists mauling Orion's face, “Do you want to fuck my pretty mouth now? Tell me – am I beautiful now? _Look at me!”_

It is both plea and threat, and Orion's gurgling shouts and spasmodic twitches as he struggles against the crushing weight of Apollo's power is a thready, weak answer. Nightlight charges forward, feeling a sick horror clench in his belly. Apollo will kill Orion in this mind, and Nightlight is no longer sure whether his gentle healer will regret it afterwards.

He hooks his hands around Apollo's arms and yanks him backwards, Apollo fighting like a hissing wildcat in his arms. He is fitting and mad with hatred and pain, his silver eyes rolling in his head as he strives to get back to his enemy. Orion slumps on the floor, unmoving, but Nightlight can see his chest still moving. He has passed out, and there is blood smeared all over his face, but the huntsman will live.

A sharp gasp tears the taut frenzy of the moment, and Apollo's head snaps up. Two nurses have rounded the corner, drawn no doubt by Orion's scream, and they stare in shocked horror at the bloody scene they are confronted with.

In an instant, Apollo's demeanour changes, like the flip of a switch. At once he slips to slick and charming, straightening up and tilting his face so that the light shines on him favourably, so they cannot see the more monstrous side of his ruined face. He grins at them winningly, and it comes out as a tugging smirk on his stiff, burnt flesh.

“Ever so sorry, darlings,” he purrs, with a wink that makes one of the girls blush and the other giggle, “You know how terrible these _hot flushes_ are...”

They start laughing and Apollo slinks towards them like a predator, linking an arm around each soft waist. He begins guiding them away, ignoring both Orion and Nightlight completely, making some lewd comment about where to apply for a private check-up, if he shows them where it hurts, will they kiss it better? The girls titter and agree, playfully swiping at his possessive hands or shoulders, their cheeks warm and red. It is as if instantly they are blind to his ugliness, and Apollo turns his head just so that the worst of it is always concealed.

In time, they will reconstruct the rest of Apollo's face, and not a single scar of the horrific burning will remain on his smooth, beautiful skin. But Nightlight knows the wounds within have already festered, and the infection runs too deep to heal.

He has at last become the man, the last ruling Tsar of the Constellations, who will set off a chain of events that will eventually rip the Golden Age apart from within.

Nightlight thinks Tsar Asterion would be proud.


End file.
